Leslie Jones: SNL Turned Me Into ‘Caricature of Myself’

Leslie Jones might be one of the most memorable cast members in Saturday Night Live history, but her time there wasn’t always easy. When the show initially hired her in 2014, she came aboard as a writer and struggled to get her pitches accepted. Only months later did she join the cast, and even then, as she noted during a recent NPR interview to promote her new memoir Leslie F*cking Jones, the show often kept her in the same roles: In her words, “either I’m trying to love on the white boys or beat up on the white boys, or I'm doing something just, like, loud.”

When she was first coming aboard as a writer, Jones recalled, Kenan Thompson and Chris Rock both assured her that Michaels wouldn’t let her walk away. Speaking with Tonya Mosley, she recalled that she wasn’t worried about getting upstaged by other comics on the show; it was the writing that wasn’t easy, because she came from a stand-up background rather than sketch comedy. It took time to learn “that when you’re writing a joke in a sketch, it has to have foundation. It has to have a story. It has to have character names. It has to have, you know, a flow.”

Mosley noted that Jones’ book discusses how the show treated Jones, in Mosley’s words, “like a caricature” once she made it into the on-screen cast. Jones didn’t dispute that notion, although she did perhaps temper it with some context.

Read more at The Daily Beast.