Saturday Night Live details the extremely dark segment she and Kenan Thompson wrote that would have featured The View moderator getting shot on-air by Colin Jost on “Weekend Update” in an excerpt from her new memoir, Leslie F*king Jones.
Leslie Jones is opening up about her life and career in hew new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, including an extremely dark “Weekend Update” segment she and Kenan Thompson tried to get on the air at Saturday Night Live with The View moderator Whoopi Goldberg.
Over the years, Goldberg has been pretty regularly featured on SNL with various impressions, including Jones and Thompson. So perhaps they were best-suited to write what could have been her swan song on the late-night staple.
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As Saturday Night Live reportedly eyes a potential comeback later this month now that the WGA strike is over, Jones is opening up about a “Weekend Update” segment that certainly had her cracking up, but got vetoed by the big man, Lorne Michaels.
It also didn’t seem to make anyone she and Thompson shared it with laugh as much as it was making them laugh. Maybe it was because they’d both portrayed Goldberg on the show. Maybe it was just too dark.
In a segment from her book shared via Entertainment Weekly, Jones revealed the bit which would have featured the real Goldberg appearing on “Weekend Update” with co-hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che … only they weren’t buying it.
“In the sketch, Colin would say, ‘Leslie, I know it’s you,’ and Whoopi would say, ‘No, no, I know Leslie plays me, but it’s really me, I’m really Whoopi,'” Jones wrote.
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“Colin then says, ‘Yeah, yeah. So what would happen if I do this?’ and pulls out a gun,” the excerpt continues. “Whoopi looks terrified. ‘Yo, no, seriously, I’m Whoopi Goldberg. I’m not Leslie, I’m really Whoopi.’ Colin looks at her, doesn’t believe her, says, “Oh yeah…’ And then shoots her.”
Harkening back to the earlier more avant garde days of SNL, Jones and Thompson then had the show cut to various shots of Michaels doing things like playing golf and taking a shower as part of a “We’ll be right back” interstitial, spliced with shots of the chaos playing out onscreen.
“Kenan and I were weeping with laughter when we wrote this,” Jones wrote. “We were actually going to shoot Whoopi Goldberg on SNL!”
Unfortunately, she said that only she and Thompson were laughing over this, as no one joined in as they tried pitching it to then-head writer Bryan Tucker, the “Update” team.
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“In the ‘Update’ office we were acting the Whoopi sketch out and laughing the whole time,” Jones wrote. “When we finished, Kenan said, ‘It’s so funny. Right?'”
“‘You guys are nuts,’ someone said. ‘You can’t kill Whoopi Goldberg on live TV,'” she continued. “‘She’s not dead!’ I shouted. ‘She just got shot.'”
Finally, they took their idea to Michaels himself, but it didn’t go much better. Even though the bit got cut, Jones still laughs about Michaels’ response to it, insisting he was “completely missing the point.”
She wrote that when they pitched it to him, he replied, “We’re not going to kill Whoopi Goldberg on national TV for a personal joke.” She insisted there was nothing “personal” about the idea, “it was just funny. But we never got to do it.”
But that’s the joy of tell-all books like Leslie F*cking Jones. We all know there are countless sketch ideas that don’t make it to air on Saturday Night Live. But we sure love it when cast members share those ideas in interviews and in their books.
Yes, it’s dark. But it also would have been pretty funny!
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