Leslie Jones is sick of smart comics. She can’t bear the sort of standups who tell stories rather than jokes, the kind who make audiences think rather than belly laugh. “They fucking suck. If I wanna learn, I’ll go to school. Don’t teach me, make me fucking laugh. I’m tired of clapping and saying: ‘Ha ha, that’s so clever.’”

Jones, 49 years old and 6ft tall, is immovable. Her big break didn’t come from the club circuit she faithfully plugged away on for 25 years, but from US comedy institution Saturday Night Live. She was originally hired as a writer by SNL creator Lorne Michaels in 2014 and promoted to cast member within a year, with the words: “You’re everything we weren’t looking for.”

Michaels is ranked the most powerful figure in US comedy and Jones, say her fellow cast members, is a pretty good litmus test for what America will think is funny. Six months after making her debut, she landed the hottest job in Hollywood: a ghostbuster in Paul Feig’s intensely anticipated all-female reboot.

“Paul told me that when he saw me do Weekend Update, he jumped out of his chair and was, ‘Who is that? That’s my girl!’ I think it might be the first one I did – and it was a controversial one.” Jones had crassly joked that she would have had a better love life “back in the slave days”, because her strength and size would have put her in demand. After that, “Paul called up Lorne Michaels and said: ‘If you don’t make her a cast member, you’ve lost your mind.’”

Hair spiked and heels on, Jones packs energy into the small room we are holed up in. She asks how I am, tells me I smell nice, gives good warm, inconsequential chit-chat while we both pretend to ignore how nerve-racking it all is. There’s a lot riding on the new Ghostbusters film, partly because it has generated such frenzied hype, partly because the animosity towards the all-female cast gives it much to prove. But Jones stays breezy, and performs our conversation as comedy, with big, expressive, palm-punching laughter breaking up her sentences.

Has she seen the finished film yet? “I haven’t seen it. I’m the type of person who is very real, and I don’t wanna see it before it’s time. ’Cos I’ll be like: ‘Hey, yo! You need to … that’s not how … can we …?’ And I don’t wanna be that way. I wanna be the only one at the premiere going crazy-wild-big laughs.” She laughs. “Have you seen it?”

Once.

“Is it good?”

Well, now I can’t tell you.

She claps and cracks up. “I like that! You’re funny. Don’t tell me!”

Feig’s film already has the difficult bit out of the way, which is the original premise for the script: a gang of four saving New York City from ghosts and bad guys. Building layers of jokes around the certain chemistry between the four women – Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Jones – has to have been the fun bit.

“We didn’t really audition,” says Jones. “Paul is one of the best comics I know that doesn’t do standup, so he already had a roadmap of the kind of characters he wanted and he already knew what he wanted to work with.” She says the script would go unchanged with no ad libbing among the four of them, until Feig would opt for a final take – “the dealer’s choice”. This was where Jones was able to argue about lines in the script. “I’d be like: ‘Paul. I wouldn’t say that, so can I say it how I would say it?’ And he be like: ‘Do it like I asked you to say it. Then do it like you want to so I can see both.’ And I would see the take and surprise myself sometimes – it worked.”

Jones filmed her standup special, Problem Child, in 2009, back when she was performing to mostly black audiences. It is bawdy and derivative, and she revels in shouting “nigga, bitch, hell naw” throughout, playing it physical but dumb. “I always thought I was fun to be around,” she says. “People always invited me to parties, like: ‘When you come to parties, girl, it is on.’ I was always getting invited places, but until I won a college contest, I never thought of myself as a comedian.”

Jones abandoned her degree at Colorado State University in the mid-80s to become a comedian. She had arrived on a basketball scholarship, won the campus standup competition, and then called her dad to tell him she was dropping out with: “I’m going to be the next Eddie Murphy!” She delivers a cartoon skit at this point.

“There was a long silence and he was like: ‘What? Who told you you could be a comedian? You’ve lost your damn mind. Wait a minute – the next Eddie Murphy? Eddie Murphy’s not fucking Eddie Murphy! You’re not fucking funny! You’ve never made me laugh! I’ve known you since you were a baby and you’ve never even made me giggle.’”

But she was determined. “I was so fricking cocky. But my dad was the one who would let me listen to all the comedy albums – Richard Pryor and Millie Jackson – I think he thought he created a monster. But he would tell me every day growing up: ‘You can do anything you want. Don’t let them tell you you can’t because you’re black, because you’re female. You can do anything you want to, but you have to work hard.’”

Performing on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2014. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

It was a slog. There were a good six months back home in Memphis where she and her father didn’t speak, followed by years working three to four jobs at a time trying to make it as a jobbing comic. She remembers one night at a Def Comedy Jam night, where she hit her lowest: “All I could think was, I got three standing O’s and I can’t believe no one’s here talking to me. Do I quit? Then, something in me was: ‘No bitch, go grab your DVDs and go out and sell them because you need some gas money.’ Real talk, that’s exactly what I did and I sold 20 DVDs that night. I don’t know if that was the lowest point, but the hustle is no option and you’ve got to have it – like, you’ll die if you don’t do this.”

It’s a bittersweet moment for Jones. Her parents are no longer alive to witness her success. Her army father died towards the end of 2000; her mother followed six months later. “My parents were together since high school. When they passed, I was like: ‘It’s no holds barred now, I have nobody to whoop me or punish me if I do this wrong. I’m going for it.’” Does she have any other family? “I had a brother, he passed away, too, in 2009.”

I exhale too loudly. Resetting the atmosphere, Jones forces another big laugh.

“Yep. It makes you tougher, and it also makes you appreciate your life and family. Oh wow, it makes me appreciate how strong I am, too.”

It wasn’t until last year, with a Ghostbusters cheque, that Jones finally paid off her last credit card and became debt-free for the first time in her adult life. When I ask who the greatest support of her career has been, it’s her turn to let out a sad oooosh. “No one in the beginning.”

Chris Rock comes up a lot, I say. He put her in his film Top Five and recommended her to Michaels. “He’s known me for ever,” she says. “He could have blew me up a long time ago but I wasn’t ready and he told me that. I remember being at a comedy gig and saying to him: ‘I’m not going to make it unless someone like you puts me on.’ And I hate to say that about this game, but women don’t just get love like that unless a dude vouches for them, which sucks. It really sucks. I would tell him every time I saw him and he’d say: ‘You’re not ready yet, you’re not ready yet.’ Then he saw me at the Comedy Store one night and I was doing that slave joke, and he was like: ‘That’s next level. You’ve next-levelled.’”

Had she ever aspired to make it to SNL? “No. Never! When Chris Rock called me to tell me he’d told Lorne Michaels I was great and he should let me audition, I went off at Chris: ‘Why would you do that? Why would you put me in that situation? I’m not an impressionist, I don’t do impressions.’”

Leslie Jones channels her inner white girl on SNL

Jones is firm that SNL’s esoteric flavour was not her type of comedy. “It’s not even funny. I [didn’t] even watch Saturday Night Live. Real talk, I told Lorne, too: I’m in the club on Saturday night, I don’t watch that and he said: ‘Shuttup and go be funny.’” Her role now, she says, is the cast rookie who comes in every day and reminds everyone of their huge privilege: “It’s like, ‘Dude! We are literally ON. TV. EVERY. WEEK to make people laugh. Why are y’all not excited about this?!’ On table reads I would laugh – I mean, the others would too, but I’d be like: ‘Ahahaha, that’s hilarious, hil-aaar-ious.’ The head writers appreciated it. People just needed to be woken up.”

But her real frustration as a standup still performing regularly in clubs is what she sees as the failure of comedians. “People don’t really understand how important comedians are, comedy is part of what we need in our life, like movies and art and water and air. We have to have the release of laughter, and when we do it as a community … Oh my God, have you ever been in a club and laughed at once on a joke? Do you know how long you feel that joy? That joy is contagious. That is not something that is a privilege, sweetheart. That is a need. And we’re not releasing community any more. Have you noticed? We’re not.”

Jones sees her role as that of a jester – mugging and clowning, pratfalling her way to distract us from the gloom. She performs, even when she is preaching. It’s convincing, even though we don’t both agree – her heroes Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock were all smart and funny. Clever, and hilarious. Jones shakes her head.

“We’re sad, [the US is] the most depressed nation in the world and I blame comedians for that. I blame the industry for that, because it is so politically correct. Back in the day, everyone thought the king had the jester to entertain him. No he did not: he had the jester to entertain everybody else, because he’s about to raise taxes and it’s: ‘Off with your head, jester, if you don’t make people laugh about that.’ That’s a community release. You need that, that’s our job to do that. You got people dying, walking into clubs and shooting folks, with so much anger. We are not releasing laughter because we’re so busy trying to be serious, teaching each other instead of just living.”

It’s a loud, passionate speech, and Jones leans in closer and closer throughout. Which makes it no less awkward, given that my next question is everything she’s been railing against: can we talk about the racial politics of her Ghostbusters character?

“Ugh.”

I know, I know.

“Ugh!”

Jones plays Ghostbuster No 4, Patty Tolan, a city train worker. Plenty has been written about her character relying fairly heavily on a racial stereotype – the buffoonish, sassy black female – that feels outmoded, especially because she is also the only one of the gang who isn’t a physicist, and who contributes lines such as: “You guys know a lot about this science stuff, but I know New York.”

“Ugh, it’s so stoopid.”

Tell me.

“I mean, come on. Stop it. I’m the regular person you want me to be in this role. You wouldn’t want no one else to play this role but me, because this role is the person that’s representing the people. I’m representing the people that’s sitting in the seats that goes: ‘There’s ghostbusters?’ Melissa and Kristen and Kate already know there are ghosts; I’m the audience. I’m becoming a ghostbuster, representing the people becoming a ghostbuster. How would you not want me?”

Team players: Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon and Kristen Wiig in Ghostbusters. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures

Sure. But you see it’s problematic, that there are certain roles black actors have been afforded in history that have now become tropes in the history of Hollywood. And, for now, in 2016, to still be writing those parts could feel lazy …

“Just because I’m a black woman doing it? Well, it’s just one role, people. Give me a scientist next, I promise the next role I play then will be some kind of brain.”

Right.

“I celebrate it. It’s just like, does she not exist? Are you saying I don’t exist? Why shouldn’t she, this character, be in the movie?” she asks. “Why even look at it like that? Back in the day, when I was coming up, the last page of Jet magazine was a guide to all the times black people were going to be on TV, because we were hardly on TV and we needed to see and support our people when we were. So my thing is, my parents and grandparents would have been, ‘Woah! She is in a Big Movie! A superhero in a BLOCKbuster.’ Why wouldn’t you be dancing in the street?”

She lets out a sigh, then laughs again.

“It’s everyone else’s hangup, it can’t be my hangup. Even if I had stood up in the middle of that movie and said ‘Fight the power, I don’t want to be the MTA [underground] worker’, what does that prove? They’d just get someone else to play the role, then you’d be bitching about them and they probably wouldn’t play it as good as me. Hellooooo!”

She cackles this time and swipes the air with her arms, forcing me to laugh with her. Jones’s presence is a genuine force; she gets up to hug me as she leaves and cheerfully tells me she’s enjoyed herself, isn’t London dope and what is that perfume? The energy entirely evaporates, ghost-like, the second she exits the room.

Ghostbusters is released in the UK on Monday 11 July.