![]() and Jim Gaffigan, occasionally refer to their looks others seem oblivious of their appearance. Some paunchy male comics, such as Louis C.K. As a comedian, it’s something you learn to use.” “But I don’t look, like, standard Hollywood. “I know I’m fly-don’t get me wrong,” she told me. ![]() She is six feet tall, and often exaggerates her stature by wearing high heels and gelling her hair upward, fright-wig style. Jones has big eyes and a round, rubbery face. “But I’m not gonna really make it unless someone like you puts me on.” Rock took out his iPhone and added her name to a list labelled “Funny people.” After her set, he told her, “You were always funny, but you’re at a new level now.” Rock saw Jones perform at the Store in 2012. A comedian named Erik Marino, who befriended her there, said, “She felt very strongly that she was being pigeonholed as a black comic-a BET comic.” I knew how to relate to that audience, and I was winning where I was, but I wasn’t moving forward.” She lived in Los Angeles at the time, and she began asking for spots at the Comedy Store, where David Letterman and Robin Williams got their starts. I stopped doing what I call ‘nigger nights’-the Chocolate Sundays, the Mo’ Better Mondays. Jones spent much of her career performing in what she calls “shitty chitlin-circuit-ass rooms, where you’re just hoping the promoter pays you.” She told me that, around 2010, “I stopped only doing black clubs. You hear Jennifer Lawrence complaining about getting paid less because she’s a woman-if she was black, she’d really have something to complain about.” “But that doesn’t mean everyone else is paying attention.” Chris Rock, who met Jones when they were both road comics in the late eighties, told me, “Black women have the hardest gig in show business. “Every black comedian in the country knew what I could do,” she said. Although she had opened for Katt Williams and Dave Chappelle, acted in movies alongside Ice Cube and Martin Lawrence, recorded a standup special for Showtime, and made several appearances on HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam” and BET’s “ComicView,” she worried that the gatekeepers of mainstream comedy-bookers for the “Tonight Show,” casting directors of big-budget films-had never heard her name. Like, when I was forty-five.” She was a woman in a field dominated by men, and an African-American in an industry that remained disturbingly segregated. “I remember some nights where I was, like, ‘All right, this comedy shit just ain’t working out,’ ” she told me recently. She was forty-six, and had been a standup comedian for more than a quarter century her peers respected her, but that respect rarely translated into high-paying gigs. I hate that shit.” End of introduction.Ĭomedians are combatants: they “kill,” they “bomb,” they “destroy.” Such bluster can mask insecurity, and Jones had good reason to feel defensive. “Funniest comedian in the game,” Jones interrupted. “I’ve been waiting to sit her ass down for a minute,” Owen Smith said. ![]() “This is gonna be kind of a hot one,” Ali LeRoi said. A couple of years ago, the co-hosts of a podcast called “Alias Smith and LeRoi” began this way, speaking about their guest, the comedian Leslie Jones, as if she were not there. The host often launches into an introduction while the guest sits quietly in the same sound booth. On podcasts, the etiquette is still being worked out. On TV talk shows, the host introduces a guest, then music plays while the guest emerges from backstage.
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