Leslie Jones Joined the SNL Cast 10 Years Ago Today

On October 25, 2014, Saturday Night Live writer and occasional guest performer Leslie Jones officially began her stint as a credited cast member. A full decade later, she remains the most recent case of someone joining the SNL cast partway through a season.

Jones’s SNL journey traces back to September 2013, when the news broke that the show had hired six featured players to fill the massive void caused by the spring exits of longtime cast members Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. The fact that all of the newcomers were white (and five were men) drew a chorus of criticism as the show was slammed for its longtime lack of diversity.

Those complaints led to the hiring of three black comediennes over Season 39’s winter break. Jones and LaKendra Tookes were enlisted as writers after trying out for the cast, while Sasheer Zamata became the show’s first black female cast member since Maya Rudolph departed in 2007.

On May 3, 2014, just nine episodes into her writing tenure, Jones made her first on-screen SNL appearance in a “Weekend Update” segment. Colin Jost, who had only been behind the news desk for two months, introduced her as an “in-house image expert” there to comment on the subject of black beauty standards.

What ensued was a controversial spiel focused on Jones’s belief that her above-average height and strength would have made her “the number one slave draft pick.” Years later, she revealed that the routine, which was adapted from her stand-up repertoire, had gestated for a decade before she first performed it.

Following a second “Weekend Update” guest spot on September 27 and two Season 40 sketch cameos, Jones was promoted to featured player status on October 20. This made her only the sixth Black female cast member in the show’s history, after Yvonne Hudson, Danitra Vance, Ellen Cleghorne, Rudolph, and Zamata.

In her first official sketch, “Carrey Family Reunion,” she briefly appeared as a starstruck waitress opposite the episode’s host, Jim Carrey. She was then given a chance to really shine (and show off her physical comedy chops) as central character Ronda Banks in the pretaped segment “Ghost Chasers.”

At 47, Jones became the oldest freshman SNL cast member ever, breaking a record that had been held for almost four decades by George Coe (46), who appeared in eight episodes of the first season but only received on-screen credit for the series premiere.

Jones and Zamata were also the first pair of black women to simultaneously be credited as SNL cast members. Until the end of Season 41, they also belonged to the show’s largest-ever black cast member subset, which also included Michael Che, Jay Pharaoh and Kenan Thompson.

Jones left SNL at the conclusion of Season 44. Since then, she has taken on various TV and movie roles, put out a Netflix special, guest hosted The Daily Show, and even wrote a memoir, titled Leslie F*cking Jones.

At the end of her book’s prologue, she wrote, “When the call came to audition for SNL, I was like, ‘If this is college, I’m already a comedy graduate.’ I was going to make them hire me… I was going to make myself undeniable.”

Although her plan ended up requiring a few extra steps, she unquestionably earned herself a special place in SNL history.