Jordan Klepper had his turn at The Daily Show’s rotating desk of hosts this week, and he was joined on Thursday’s episode by a surprise guest: Leslie Jones.
The former SNL cast member made her debut as a Daily Show contributor after Klepper’s monologue, delivering an impassioned plea to not elect former President Donald Trump back into office.
“Your favorite auntie is back to straighten out America,” Jones began before warning viewers that “America is on the path to doing something really, really stupid!”
In classic Leslie Jones form, she continued: “What the f**k is wrong with us?! This is like a movie where you see the disaster coming from a mile away, and nobody is stopping it. Every time I turn on the news, I’m shouting at the screen like it’s a horror movie. ‘Don’t go in there, America! Leatherface is in there, America!”
Jones’ monologue came as an installment of Klepper’s segment “In My Opinion,” which first had John Leguizamo take the desk.
Jones’ segment Thursday night ran for a whopping nine minutes.
The Daily Show now has three current contributors, with Jones joining Lewis Black, the longest-running contributor to the show, and Klepper himself, who served as a correspondent from 2014-2017 before returning to the show in 2019 as a contributor.
While Thursday represented Jones’ debut as a Daily Show contributor, she’s well acquainted with the desk. Jones served as host for two week-long stints on the program in 2023, and was actually the first host to lead the show during its guest-hosted era. (Past “In My Opinion” guest Leguizamo had also previously spent a week hosting.) Jones’ last appearance was in November 2023, which she co-hosted with Klepper.
Jones isn’t the first former SNL alum to land on The Daily Show (others who previously appeared on the NBC sketch show include Rob Riggle, A. Whitney Brown, and Nancy Wells), but she is the longest tenured SNL cast member to take an official role on the Comedy Central series. (Michael Che took the opposite route. He was briefly a Daily Show correspondent in the summer of 2014 before he was poached by SNL that September.)
The Daily Show’s current format sees former host Jon Stewart anchoring Monday episodes, with a rotating cast of correspondents taking turns filling out the rest of the week. Given that Jones now shares the same title as Klepper, one wonders: might this mean we could see her behind the desk for another week herself sometime in the near future?
So HAPPY to see Leslie Jones on the Daily Show. Now that Jon Stewart is back, if only once a week, life is good again and I can cope with almost any thing. Not with Trump though. He is a wanne be dictator.
Aside from John Stewart, Leslie Jones is the best on the Daily Show. I’ve hoped she would come back. She is great!