Born: 7 September 1967, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
In 2014, 46-year-old Leslie Jones became the oldest cast member ever hired for Saturday Night Live. “I remember some nights where I was, like, All right, this comedy shit just ain’t working out. And not just when I was 25. Like, when I was 45,” she later said. “Every black comedian in the country knew what I could do. But that doesn’t mean everyone else is paying attention.”
Jones had several factors working against her—she was an African American woman working in a male-dominated and often implicitly segregated field.
“She felt very strongly that she was being pigeonholed as a black comic—a BET comic,” a friend and fellow comedian later remarked. “Bookers are the ones who care about black rooms versus white rooms. To us comedians, it’s, like, if you know what you’re doing and you can connect with an audience, they’re gonna laugh.”
It likely didn’t help that at six feet tall and darker skinned than many other African American women, Jones was not considered conventionally attractive. “I know I’m fly—don’t get me wrong,” she has said. “But I don’t look, like, standard Hollywood. As a comedian, it’s something you learn to use.”
In addition to her film and television work, Jones’s first stand-up special, Problem Child, aired on Showtime in 2010, and her 2020 Netflix special, Time Machine, included material on life in her 50s and what she’d tell younger women. Her award-winning and bestselling memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, was published in 2023.
“I’m glad this whole success thing is happening now,” she told The New Yorker in 2015 while filming Ghostbusters. “I can’t even imagine a twenty-three-year-old Leslie in this position. They would have kicked me off the set after two days. I would have fucked half the dudes in the crew. I was a less confident person back then. And damn sure not as funny.”