A little more than a month after Trevor Noah officially said goodbye to The Daily Show, Comedy Central welcomed former Saturday Night Live cast member Leslie Jones as the first of several planned guest hosts on Tuesday night. And she had a hell of a story to start with in the inadvertently suggestive statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that was unveiled in Boston the day before.
After staring for a few seconds at the sculpture, which is supposed to depict King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, in a loving embrace, Jones had one question for her live audience: “Has anyone in here ever been eaten out?”
“Because they are celebrating you right now in Boston!” she continued. “Listen, I know Dr. King went down in history, but this is not how you show it.”
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Jones then turned to a different camera to speak for a moment directly to any white people watching at home. “White people, you don’t need to say shit about this statue!” she said. “You need to sit your ass in the back of the bus for this one.”
“This is a civil rights icon,” she added to cheers from the crowd, before concluding her sentence with, “...going down on his wife. You show some damn respect!”
Back to camera one, Jones put her head in her hands and said, “OK, Black people, what the fuck we gonna do?” She joked that “you know it’s messed up when Black people and the Proud Boys hate the same statue.”
But given that people hated the Eiffel Tower when it first went up, Jones predicted that “maybe it’s just a matter of time” and that “in time, maybe we’ll see this statue for what it really is… Martin Luther King going down on his wife.”
“I can’t unsee it!” Jones concluded.
Over the next several weeks, The Daily Show will welcome guest hosts including Chelsea Handler and Roy Wood Jr., both of whom have expressed interest in taking on the role full time. But it’s not going to be easy to top this.
For more, listen to Roy Wood Jr. on The Last Laugh podcast.
