Saturday Night Live is starting to look a little bit more like the rest of America, at least in terms of diversity. First the NBC staple installed Michael Che as the first black anchor for its long-running Weekend Update segment, and now Leslie Jones has been promoted from a writer on the show to a featured player. Her first official episode as a cast member will be the 25 October episode featuring Jim Carrey as host. The poor woman – always to have her time at SNL linked to Jim Carrey.
This is the first time in its 40-year history that SNL will be the home to two black women, Jones and Sasheer Zamata. Both women found their way to the show when SNL came under fire in 2013 for not having any black women in its repertory (something Kerry Washington hilariously skewered when guest-hosting the show). The controversy caused producer Lorne Michaels to hold a special showcase for black women, hiring Zamata in the cast and Jones and LaKendra Tookes as writers.
SNL’s new hiring practices just show what can happen when a show (heck, any sort of enterprise) really pays attention to diversity and tries to recruit the types of voices that it’s lacking. Leslie Jones is not a funny black woman, she is a funny person, full stop. Check out her Showtime standup special on Hulu. She is brash and outrageous and does not apologise for the things that she says that might cross the line, giving her something in common with two late greats: Joan Rivers and Richard Pryor.
But SNL never would have found her using its usual system of recruiting from improv troupes and other farm leagues. Because that process was not finding worthy black women, it had to be reassessed, and the new system has proven quite effective, even more so than Michaels would have imagined. This not only makes for more diversity but a better show in general. If it hadn’t tried something new, SNL never would have found these vital and invigorating performers.
The choice of Jones, however, is not without controversy. She appeared as a guest on Weekend Update last May and did a bit about how she might not be considered beautiful now, but in slave times she would have been used for breeding because she’s so big and strong. This angered many in the black community, including an editor at Ebony, who said that Jones was making fun of slave rape. This upset Jones, who went on a tear on Twitter defending her humour (which, for the record, is never a good idea).
This is sort of like the controversy surrounding Shonda Rhimes being called an angry black woman in the New York Times last month. Regardless of how you feel about either issue, these are dust-ups that can only occur when you have black women featured prominently on television. Sure the arguments can be ridiculous, but we would never be here if Rhimes wasn’t giving the lead roles in hit television dramas to deserving black women and if Jones wasn’t allowed time on the SNL stage, something that has been incredibly rare for black women. As with anything that is new, things are going to go wrong and feathers are going to get ruffled, but I’d rather have the occasional internet brouhaha and a whole cross-section of voices on the airwaves than I would things being nice and safe and white and male. We’ve had that for long enough, and it’s time it changed. Hear that, late night television?
It’s actually a vote of confidence in Jones that after the backlash to her first skit she not only got other chances to go on Weekend Update but subsequently got promoted. It would have been easy forMichaels to back away from her after her first appearance caused a firestorm, once again drawing attention to issues of race on the show. Instead he doubled down on her, showing the world that he’s willing to test the boundaries of comedy and push the envelope not just in terms of what makes people laugh, but also in terms of progress.
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