On TV talk shows, the host introduces a guest, then music plays while the guest emerges from backstage. On podcasts, the etiquette is still being worked out. The host often launches into an introduction while the guest sits quietly in the same sound booth. A couple of years ago, the co-hosts of a podcast called “Alias Smith and LeRoi” began this way, speaking about their guest, the comedian Leslie Jones, as if she were not there.

“This is gonna be kind of a hot one,” Ali LeRoi said.

“I’ve been waiting to sit her ass down for a minute,” Owen Smith said. “One of the funniest women in the game.”

“Funniest comedian in the game,” Jones interrupted. “Not just woman. I hate that shit.” End of introduction.

Comedians are combatants: they “kill,” they “bomb,” they “destroy.” Such bluster can mask insecurity, and Jones had good reason to feel defensive. She was forty-six, and had been a standup comedian for more than a quarter century; her peers respected her, but that respect rarely translated into high-paying gigs. “I remember some nights where I was, like, ‘All right, this comedy shit just ain’t working out,’ ” she told me recently. “And not just when I was twenty-five. Like, when I was forty-five.” She was a woman in a field dominated by men, and an African-American in an industry that remained disturbingly segregated. Although she had opened for Katt Williams and Dave Chappelle, acted in movies alongside Ice Cube and Martin Lawrence, recorded a standup special for Showtime, and made several appearances on HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam” and BET’s “ComicView,” she worried that the gatekeepers of mainstream comedy—bookers for the “Tonight Show,” casting directors of big-budget films—had never heard her name. “Every black comedian in the country knew what I could do,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean everyone else is paying attention.” Chris Rock, who met Jones when they were both road comics in the late eighties, told me, “Black women have the hardest gig in show business. You hear Jennifer Lawrence complaining about getting paid less because she’s a woman—if she was black, she’d really have something to complain about.”

Jones spent much of her career performing in what she calls “shitty chitlin-circuit-ass rooms, where you’re just hoping the promoter pays you.” She told me that, around 2010, “I stopped only doing black clubs. I stopped doing what I call ‘nigger nights’—the Chocolate Sundays, the Mo’ Better Mondays. I knew how to relate to that audience, and I was winning where I was, but I wasn’t moving forward.” She lived in Los Angeles at the time, and she began asking for spots at the Comedy Store, where David Letterman and Robin Williams got their starts. A comedian named Erik Marino, who befriended her there, said, “She felt very strongly that she was being pigeonholed as a black comic—a BET comic.”

For a while, Jones performed at the Store at odd hours. Then, she said, “I went to the booker and I threw the race card at him. ‘Why you won’t let me go up at ten on a Friday? ’Cause I’m black?’ ” The booker gave her a prime-time slot. “She destroyed, obviously,” Marino said. “Bookers are the ones who care about black rooms versus white rooms. To us comedians, it’s, like, if you know what you’re doing and you can connect with an audience, they’re gonna laugh.”

Rock saw Jones perform at the Store in 2012. After her set, he told her, “You were always funny, but you’re at a new level now.”

“You’re right,” she responded. “But I’m not gonna really make it unless someone like you puts me on.” Rock took out his iPhone and added her name to a list labelled “Funny people.”

Jones has big eyes and a round, rubbery face. She is six feet tall, and often exaggerates her stature by wearing high heels and gelling her hair upward, fright-wig style. “I know I’m fly—don’t get me wrong,” she told me. “But I don’t look, like, standard Hollywood. As a comedian, it’s something you learn to use.”

Some paunchy male comics, such as Louis C.K. and Jim Gaffigan, occasionally refer to their looks; others seem oblivious of their appearance. Women don’t have this luxury. Jones often begins her standup sets by “taking away their bullets”—neutralizing anything that might distract an audience, so that “they can stop looking at my outfit, stop worrying about whether I think I’m sexy, and just listen.” Her Showtime special, “Problem Child,” which aired in 2010, began that way:

I know y’all already noticed that I’m a big bitch. . . . When I walk in a Payless, it gets quiet than a motherfucker. . . . I swear, men, if you can get past my big-ass feet and how tall I am, I’m a great fucking catch. . . . I’m fine. I can fuck. I can fight. Oh, I ain’t no damsel in distress, motherfucker. You can go get the car, baby, while I handle these three thug motherfuckers.

The final line devolves into shadowboxing—Jones bobbing and weaving like a mean-mugging Buster Keaton.

One bullet that this opening takes away is speculation about Jones’s sexuality. She has never been married and has no children; much of her act these days is about trying to find a man. “I speak for the lonely bitches,” she said. She was born in Memphis and raised in a churchgoing family. At one point, she told me, “It’s too bad I’m not gay, ’cause I’d get the flyest bitches.”

The opening of her special also allows her to pivot quickly to pantomime, one of her greatest comedic skills. Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, likes to say that an anchor should be interesting even with the TV on mute. Jones has similar thoughts about comedy. “People get hung up on writing smart shit,” she said. “To me, it’s more about performance. Lucille Ball and Moms Mabley, they had face. Before they even said a word, they made you crack up.” Paul Feig, the director of “Bridesmaids” and other comedies, compared Jones to Will Ferrell and Chris Farley: “They all have the ability to take a larger-than-life persona and present it in a real, accessible way.”

Some self-consciously hip venues foster an arch, hyperverbal style of standup that is sometimes called alt comedy. A Jones show is more like a semi-improvised concert. “She has a presence, when you see her live, that is extremely rare,” the comedian Marc Maron said. “And, honestly, it has very little to do with what she’s saying. The first time I saw her, I was blown away, and yet I couldn’t tell you a single one of her jokes.”