Leslie Jones Regrets How The ‘SNL’ “Machine” Turned Her Into “A Caricature Of Myself”

Despite her half-decade as a wildly successful writer and player for Saturday Night Live, comedian Leslie Jones recently shared that the roles she played on the sketch comedy show could be limiting. In an interview with Tonya Mosley on NPR to promote her new book, Leslie F*cking Jones: A Memoir, Jones reflected on how the show’s success defined the types of characters she played.

“I’ve been doing comedy so long, it’s like, I know what I am. And I know what I’m giving them. At SNL, they take that one thing and they wring it. They wring it because that’s the machine,” Jones said. 

She added, “So it was like a caricature of myself. … Either I’m trying to love on the white boys or beat up on the white boys, or I’m doing something loud.”

Jones shared that, looking back, this was common practice for other players on the show as well. She understood the difficult task executive producer Lorne Michaels had putting together a good show every week during the season, comparing him to a puppet master.

“So he has to make the cast happy, has to make the writers happy, he has to make the WGA happy, he has to make NBC happy. Then he has to make a family in Omaha, Nebraska, who’s watching the show happy,” she said. “Imagine the strings that have to go out to him.”

Jones first joined the show in 2014 at 47 years old, first as a writer then as a cast member, where she went on to make a name for herself as an energetic physical performer with memorable turns in Weekend Update. While on SNL, Jones as played roles like Whoopi Goldberg  and even Donald Trump. She earned three Primetime Emmy Award nominations during her run, but it wasn’t a smooth ride at first. Because of her extensive background in stand-up before joining the show, she had to learn the art of sketch comedy through many failed pitches.

“That’s the thing that I really had to learn was that when you writing a joke in a sketch, it has to have foundation,” she explained to NPR. “Like, it has to have a story. It has to have character names. It has to have, you know, a flow.”

But the years she spent on Saturday Night Live were great training ground for the rest of her career to come, which includes, most recently, winning an MTV Movie Award for her turn opposite Eddie Murphy in Coming 2 America, as well as a guest host gig for The Daily Show earlier this year.

SNL is now streaming on Peacock. The show is currently on hiatus amidst the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.