SNL star Leslie Jones recently reminisced about her first major flop during her tenure on Saturday Night Live, when her sketch failed to land, in a recent podcast appearance. She initially assumed that the audience did not laugh because she “froze” in the midst of her sketch, but host Jesse David Fox later explained to her that it was because no one knew what the joke was. She shared the stage with Chris Rock on this occasion.
Leslie Jones says she didn’t know her lines during SNL bomb
Leslie Jones recently recalled her first major sketch on SNL during a recent appearance on Vulture’s Good One podcast, where she recalled how she fumbled badly while trying to do a sketch called “The Arguing Couple,” with Chris Rock.
Jones explained on the podcast, “So the joke was that we’ve been with each other so long that we just been arguing, but we love each other.” She continued, “But we’re driving our kid crazy with how we argue, you know what I’m saying?”
But at this time, Jones was struggling with the sketch as she had not figured out the ins and outs of the live take till then. “I didn’t understand the color of the pens. So I didn’t know that the host is always black… and then I had blue. They didn’t tell me what my color was, so I didn’t know what my lines [were],” she recalled.
This led to the stage manager loudly directing her, which thankfully did not come on camera. “I remember that being terrible…And afterwards, I felt like I was just going to jump into the river.”
Thankfully, there were many who had her back after the fumble. “Every cast member, including Lorne [Michaels], came up and said, ‘This is Live, baby,” she shared. “And I remember Vanessa Bayer sitting down next to me and going, ‘It’ll never happen again, will it?’ And I was like, ‘Damn, you guys are so good.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s happened to everyone,” she added.
Of course, following this, Jones had a memorable tenure on SNL and remains one of the iconic members of the show.
