SNL star Leslie Jones recently reminisced about her first major flop during her tenure on Saturday Night Live, when one of her sketches failed to land. She initially assumed that the audience did not laugh because she “froze” in the middle of her performance. However, host Jesse David Fox later explained to her that it was because no one understood the joke. On that occasion, she shared the stage with Chris Rock.
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. There, she described how she struggled while performing 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?”
At that time, Jones was struggling with the sketch as she had not yet figured out the logistics of performing live. “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 confusion led to the stage manager loudly directing her, though it did not appear on camera. “I remember that being terrible…And afterwards, I felt like I was just going to jump into the river.”
Fortunately, several people offered her support after the mishap. “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.
Following this, Jones went on to have a memorable tenure on SNL and became one of the show’s most recognizable cast members.
Originally reported by Sourav Chakraborty on ComingSoon.
