Weeks after Saturday Night Live's producers watched Ellen Cleghorne's audition at a New York comedy club, they called her with not-great news: They still couldn't make up their minds. ''I said, 'Listen, the next time you call me, if you don't tell me I got the job, I'm going to jump out the window,''' recalls the Brooklyn native. '''And I only live on the second floor, so I'm going to have to do it a couple of times.''' Good gambit. Cleghorne was hired for SNL's featured cast last fall and has already created two recurring hit characters- an in-your-face NBC page, and the Afrocentrist critic Queen Shaniqua, whose six-word review of Pretty Woman (''Cinderella story?! She was a whore!'') won one of this season's biggest laughs. Although SNL's ensemble is currently a crowded 16 (''It's like living in the projects with only one bathroom''), Cleghorne is getting noticed, thanks in part to an assertiveness she cultivated while teaching acting to inmates at New York's Riker's Island jail. ''I knew a lot of people in there,'' she says, bemused. ''It never occurred to me until later that I could have been one of them if I didn't have strict parents.'' With Riker's on her resume, it's no surprise that Cleghorne doesn't scare easily. ''My only fear in life,'' she says, ''is not being funny.'' Shouldn't be a big problem.
You Might Also Like
- TV Review Saturday Night Live | Ken Tucker
- TV Review Saturday Night Live | Ken Tucker
- TV Review SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE | Ken Tucker
- Book Review Saturday Night Live | Bruce Fretts
- TV Q&A Lorne Michaels talks Sarah Palin | Jennifer Armstrong
- Television News Tina Fey is so good she's bad for 'SNL' | Ken Tucker
