"Leslie F*cking Jones" Is F*cking Dope

Leslie Jones is doing another bang-up job hosting The Daily Show this week, prompting me to check out her new book Leslie F*ing Jones on Audible, and it's even funnier than I expected. She reads the book in her energetic and no-nonsense, straight-ahead style like she's having a conversation with the listener.

"When Leslie Jones walks into a room, she's always out of breath and mad about something," writes Chris Rock in the book's foreword. Rock suggested Lorne Michaels give Jones a tryout when he was looking to add a Black woman to the cast of SNL in 2013. "She's too funny not to be everywhere, in every movie, on every TV show, with ten Netflix specials," Rock opines, adding she should also play a Marvel villain and Harriet Tubman. 

Jones writes in the introduction, "Some of the stories about my childhood are vague because a bitch is fifty-five and I've smoked a lot of weed." Her stories about weed all start with NOT using it, since it seems that was more unusual for her. When asked if she was would mind rooming with some Rastas, Jones writes, "OK with Rastas? I would never not have weed." 

Starting with the opening story about how she insisted on being paid as a headliner at clubs when male comics made excuses to put her on last so that they didn't have to follow her, the book is full of illuminating and empowering stories from her many years on the road. 

She recalls smoking weed in a Ladera Heights, CA parking lot before performing at Maverick's, and "that made me cocky at the wrong time." She forgot her whole set and, after a moment of silence, ran off the stage. "I was not good enough to smoke weed before I worked," she wrote. (Many comics say smoking weed throws their timing off; however George Carlin almost always smoked it before performing.) 

About a road trip where she drove between gigs, she writes, "My entire plan, beyond avoiding Texas because of Thelma & Louise, was this: No smoking weed while I was driving during the day. I wanted to be clear, not just so I was safe, but because this was kind of a spiritual journey, too. I wanted to talk to God and have a solid plan. That meant I was going to save weed for the hotel at night, because I knew I was going to need it."

She then relates how she dropped a "really big bag of chronic" from her pocket at a desolate St. George, Utah diner. "So back I went, out on to  the empty street—I swear to God there was an actual fucking tumbleweed blowing by—but no one at the diner had seen the weed. Yes, I asked—it was the chronic after all. I wonder if they'd already smoked it. They did seem kinda chill about it..."

Jones first caught my eye (and ear) in a bit where she describes her Jamaican vacation on SNL. "I did everything: I got my hair braided, I smoked a little weed, coconut oiled myself all up, smoked a whole lot more weed..." In 2017 and 2018, Jones was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on SNL. 

Born in 1967 in Memphis, Jones's father, who was in the recording industry, moved her family to Los Angeles, where Leslie the Tall and Powerful played basketball in high school. She attended Chapman University and Colorado State on a basketball scholarship, considering pre-law as a major before settling on communications. Speaking of the intense physical conditioning she did while playing college ball and the body she had as a result, she writes, "If I ever weigh 167 again, I'm smoking crack." She says that she didn't start smoking weed until she left college. 

After a friend signed her up for a "Funniest Person on Campus" contest, Jones began performing standup, while working day jobs as an Orange County clerk and lunch lady. The rest is herstory, as the book relates with humor and heart. 

Eddie Murphy, who's also a Jones fan, cast her in his 2021 film Coming 2 America, where she plays a character who turns Murphy (playing an African prince) onto "ceremonial herbs." She kills it (as always), and was one of the few guests on Bill Maher's Club Random to smoke pot with him. (She brought her own, looking as stylish as Lola Falana, and saying she smokes "a lot" of weed, doesn't drink "unless I need to drink," and got caught with weed in Canada the day before 9/11.) Earlier this year, she did this very funny bit on The Daily Show explaining how marijuana was responsible for someone at the White House letting Trump and Biden walk away with the classified documents found in their houses.