Chris Rock has a powerful Hollywood Reporter essay out today that breaks down his thoughts on Hollywood’s race problem, and in the middle of the essay there’s some great SNL trivia for fans of newly added featured player Leslie Jones. According to the essay, Rock was lobbying to get Jones on the show long before she actually got the job:
And I have a decent batting average. I still remember people thinking I was crazy for hiring Wanda Sykes on my old HBO show. I recommended J.B. Smoove for Saturday Night Live, and I just helped Leslie Jones get on that show. She’s about as funny as a human being can be, but she didn’t go to Second City, she doesn’t do stand-up at The Cellar and she’s not in with Judd Apatow, so how the hell was she ever going to get through unless somebody like me says to Lorne Michaels, “Hey, look at this person”? I saw her at a comedy club four or five years ago, and I wrote her name down in my phone. I probably called four managers — the biggest managers in comedy — to manage her, and all of them said no. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get it until Lorne said yes a few years later, and then it was too late.
Rock also mentions the “How 2 Dance with Janelle” sketch from his episode last month in terms of the racial progress SNL has made since he was a cast member in the early ‘90s:
When I was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, we did a sketch where I was Sasheer Zamata’s dad and she had an Internet show. Twenty years ago when I was on Saturday Night Live, anything with black people on the show had to deal with race, and that sketch we did didn’t have anything to do with race. That was the beauty: The sketch is funny because it’s funny, and that’s the progress.
Read the rest of Rock’s essay over at THR.
