In “Life, Part 2,” Leslie Jones Wants to Make Everybody Laugh

“You know what’s so crazy? I’m famous,” says the comedian Leslie Jones, clad in a black sparkling “Heart Breaker” T-shirt and ever-present towel in hand (for her hot flashes) on her new comedy special “Life Part 2.” “Why would they give fame to me? Why?” she asks. “I still go to 7-Eleven in my pajamas.”

Ms. Jones’s incredulity may make sense when you consider that, though she’s been doing stand-up for over 30 years — a journey that began when her college friend, Denita Abernethy, entered Ms. Jones, then a student at Colorado State University, in the “Funniest Person on Campus” competition (she won) — Ms. Jones didn’t break out until she was 47 when she joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” shortly after having been hired by the show as a writer. Not that she’s complaining: Ms. Jones, who at 58 now divides her time between Los Angeles and New York City, contended that she wasn’t ready for fame or success when she was younger.

“I didn’t even know who the president was when I was in my 20s,” she said. “It’s like, all I wanted to know was, where’s the free tequila?”

Ms. Jones wasn’t apathetic; she was carrying a lot of trauma. She said she was sexually abused by a babysitter when she was a toddler. Her parents — Willie Jones Jr., an electronic engineer, and Sundra Diane Jones, a cable company employee who suffered a stroke at 38 — were struggling. Her younger brother, Rodney (who went by his middle name, Keith), dealt drugs and had trouble extricating himself from that life. And, at 19, she had been chastened by the up-and-coming comedian Jamie Foxx who offered her some salient, if harsh, advice after she bombed during a set at The World. “Go live your life and make some material — because right now you have none,” she recounts him saying in her memoir, “Leslie F*cking Jones.”

Ms. Jones supported her developing comedy career, in which she was performing at places like the Comedy Act Theater and Maverick’s in Los Angeles, by working at restaurants including Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Around 2005, she chased Chris Rock as he walked to his car at an L.A. comedy club and begged him to hook her up with his vast network of contacts. In her version of the story, she said that Mr. Rock told her she wasn’t ready.

Mr. Rock, however, has affectionately disputed her account. “Leslie is hilarious,” he said in a phone interview. “She was always ready. The world wasn’t ready for Leslie Jones.”

“Leslie writes these well-crafted jokes and makes it seem effortless when she’s performing,” he added. “She’s really genuine, so you leave her shows with the sense that you got to really know her.”

But around 2010, Ms. Jones first performed a provocative joke she wrote in 1997 that came to be called “The Slave Joke.” It was a hit, but also demonstrated that the risks she was taking were paying off. Mr. Rock put her on the top of a short list of the funniest Black women he kept when industry people asked him for recommendations — people like Lorne Michaels.

Mr. Rock told Mr. Michaels to audition Ms. Jones, who’d never performed nor written sketch comedy. Mr. Michaels heeded Mr. Rock’s advice and hired her as a writer in 2014, eventually bringing her on as a cast member. (That part took some negotiating — she said Mr. Michaels asked if she’d “go down to feature pay” but she demanded to be paid for both roles, per her contract. Mr. Michaels obliged.)

Being on “S.N.L.” was initially a daunting challenge for Ms. Jones, especially joining as the oldest member of the cast. “I didn’t understand until I got there that being 47 was ‘older people,’” she said, laughing about being on a show where one of the older cast members was Kenan Thompson, who was 11 years younger than her. “I was not the grown-up in the room. I never was. Kenan was the grown-up in the room. The only thing that I did was show them that at my age, you’re not old.”

“Leslie is a force of nature and truly like a sister to me,” Mr. Thompson wrote in an email.

After earning three Emmy nominations during her five-season tenure on “Saturday Night Live” (2014-2019), she’s now on her third comedy special, has starred in movies (e.g., “Coming 2 America,” and the female reboot of “Ghostbusters”), has had recurring roles in TV series, and has hosted award and game shows. In 2023, she published her best-selling memoir, which recounts not only her complicated path to stardom, but her experiences with racism, rejection and profound loss. She has, through force of will, become a household name.

“My dream was to be like tourists come up to me and go, ‘Leslie, picture, please!’” she said. “If you want to be a really good artist, you’re supposed to play to the masses.”

“Become Undeniable”

Some of the experiences that helped Ms. Jones find the courage and the focus included the loss of her parents, within six months of each other from heart-related illnesses. But it was the death of her younger brother, in November 2009, that devastated her. It led her to soul-searching, concluding there had been no foundation to her standup — it was all about getting laughs.

Ms. Jones worried her “smart jokes were too smart” for her to perform; she’d written them with other comics in mind, like her idols Whoopi Goldberg or Marsha Warfield. Or, for herself for “when I got really funny.”

Ms. Jones found herself gripped by an existential crisis.

“I said at the time, the worst thing to me is not even death; it’s losing someone, you know,” she said. She recalled the words of her late father, who wanted nothing more than to see his daughter thrive. He told her she’d have to “become undeniable.” Ms. Jones said, “I pulled out the jokes that I’d been saying, ‘Hey, am I smart enough to do this?’”

“I was pissed off when I wrote it because I was like, the choices I have in men is disgusting,” Ms. Jones said. “And I’m glad I waited because when it was time for me to pull it out, I was ready to do it. I was doing everything I could to hurt myself or get myself in trouble, or get where somebody wanted to fight me — in that mode of ‘somebody pinch me. Is my brother dead for real?’”

At first, recalled Ms. Jones, “People came after me. They told me I was praising slavery,” which rattled her. She told them, “You’re not really listening.”

The conflict was one of the joke’s greatest virtues, she realized, because, “I was doing comedy that’s making people talk in their living rooms.” Ms. Jones’s subversion of the power structure by making subjugation benefit her persona in some way, is one of the hallmarks of her comedy. Though, she admitted with a cackle, “Ultimately, it’s about getting a guy.”

If They’re Laughing, They’re Listening

Ms. Jones revisits minefield territory in “Life Part 2” — a show in which she imagines her ideal funeral, and calls out straight men for their terrible physical and mental hygiene (Ms. Jones is a strong advocate of therapy) — with a MeToo joke that treads very close to the line.

Ms. Jones dealt with a great deal of racist and sexist abuse online after the all-female reboot of “Ghostbusters” was released in 2016, but as disturbed and upset as she was, she contended, “I still can’t hate nobody, because when people come at me, I just feel sorry for them. To me, the fact that racism still exists is just maddening, because at this point, racism is being uneducated.”

Ms. Jones speaks from lived experience. Born in Memphis, she grew up as an Army brat at Fort Bragg, and said she witnessed the way parents socialized their kids to be racist. She said all the young kids, white and Black, were playing together rather innocently. When her mother discovered that the white parents were using racist epithets for Ms. Jones, they had to have a brutal conversation about racism that rocked Ms. Jones’s world.

She knew her father, who had grown up in the Jim Crow South, had endured racist violence, and had to come to “hate white people” — but she did not. She surmised that, at least in theory, if racism could be taught it could be untaught, which is where her comedy might step in. If they’re laughing, they’re listening.

Earlier this month in Manhattan, while hanging out with friends in front of the Village Underground, where Ms. Jones loves to work on new material, a young woman asked the comedian for a selfie. Soon, more people — Zoomers to Boomers of various racial and ethnic backgrounds — recognized the comedian, and requested their own selfies. It was her dream come true.

“You know, I have a lot of MAGA people that are my fans because I speak their language,” said Ms. Jones. “My demographic of people is, like, from 18 to 74. I have humor for everyone — I, at least, try to. When I’m writing my jokes, I write them like a human woman, because if it makes me laugh, it’s gonna make everybody laugh. I want to make everybody laugh.”