Leslie Jones played a distant cousin of Meghan Markle over the weekend on the latest episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and a lot of people said it resembled buffoonery. They also criticized the veteran comedian.
The skit opens up with Jones explaining that her name is Shantay Thomas of the Compton Thomases, and she wants to see the child Markle has with her husband Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.
“Show me where the baby at,” Jones said to her British hosts.
The comedian was then told there were certain protocols to follow, so she had to take etiquette training by a woman played by actress Emma Thompson, who gave her lessons on how to properly stir tea.
“Have you ever attended high tea?” the etiquette coach asks her.
“No but I had tea while I’m high,” Jones shoots back.
The coach then puts her lessons into a song and sings the words “Back and forth,” which Jones repeats but instead sings “Back and forfe.” The etiquette trainer then slaps the tea cup out of her hand, because she wasn’t stirring in the right way.
From there, the Shantay character continues to get her lessons wrong, so the teacher slaps Jones across the face, punches her and pushes her head into a bowl of clotted cream.
After the clip aired, a lot of folks blamed Jones for even being in it and said she should’ve had way more pride.
“Leslie is such a f—-ing clown, I swear. Always shucking and jiving,” someone wrote.
“That skit with Leslie Jones with the pie in her face was straight buffoonery. Not Funny #SNL”
“Leslie always behaves like this,” someone else chimed in. “I feel like she has some insecurities and is behaving how she thinks people see her.”
Markle has a black mother and white father, and some of her white side of the family have made headlines for being in trouble with the law.
Like her stepbrother Thomas Markle Jr. for example, who was arrested in 2017 when he allegedly threatened his girlfriend with a gun. Markle’s father was also reportedly a drug addict during her teen years.
So some asked why a member of her black family was portrayed in the skit when there’s not much known about them.
“Why make up some hypothetical black cousin when she has white family members that have actually given them plenty of material to work with?” someone asked.
Jones hasn’t responded to the backlash yet.
