Tiffany Haddish cannot take a compliment. Mention that her exuberantly unfiltered performance in the ensemble comedy Girls Trip stole the movie, and vaulted her into the position of breakout star, and the South Central, Los Angeles-born standup is quick to respond: “I’m not a thief. Where I come from, you don’t call someone that. I get really upset when people say, you stole the movie. I’m like: ‘I didn’t steal nothin’, that’s my job!’”
Nevertheless, in a year when every Hollywood live-action comedy has bombed, when questions are being asked at executive level as to whether comedies are even capable of competing at the box office any more, the $100m-grossing Girls Trip is 2017’s sole beacon of hope. While the movie, depicting estranged college friends reuniting for a weekend of debauchery and bonding in New Orleans, affords better-established ensemble members Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and Regina Hall numerous moments to shine, audiences emerged from Girls Trip singing the praises of Haddish. Whether enthusiastically and messily demonstrating oral sex techniques with a grapefruit and a banana, unleashing a tsunami of pee on passersby while hanging from a zipwire, or tripping on absinthe, Haddish’s irrepressible party girl Dina is – like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Bridesmaids or Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover – the comic relief who conquers the movie through sheer force of personality.
Vanity Fair called Haddish "the funniest person alive right now" after her breakout role in Girls Trip. It is the only comedy so far this year to make $100 million at the US box office.
Haddish will host Saturday Night Live on 11 November, alongside Taylor Swift.
She will star in Night School with Kevin Hart next year.
“I definitely brought 85% of myself to that character,” allows Haddish. “There’s a lot of Tiffany Haddish in Dina. When I first read the script I was like: ‘Somebody’s been partying with me, somebody knows me really well.’ I would never relieve myself on a bunch of people walking across the street as I’m dangling overhead, but there are a lot of other things that I would do.”
Jerry Seinfeld once described the moment a comedian achieves mainstream success, with all its attendant privileges, as the time they get their comedy kit: in 2017, Tiffany Haddish’s comedy kit consists of a standup special; an autobiography, The Last Black Unicorn (a poetic title that actually refers to an unsightly wart on teen Tiffany’s forehead); a comedy album; a co-starring role in Kevin Hart’s next movie, Night School; a regular part opposite Tracy Morgan in his sitcom The Last OG; and, in the wake of rapturously received appearances with Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, the status of most-desirable guest on the US late-night talkshow couch. She is set to host SNL next week.
Haddish’s road to her comedy kit was lengthy and hard-fought, however. There is a well-worn cliche that standup comics tell jokes to mask their internal pain and dysfunction. In the case of Haddish, that cliche is something of an understatement. In the first chapter of The Last Black Unicorn, Haddish writes: “I should probably start with the car accident.” When she was nine years old, Tiffany was making dinner for her four step-siblings and waiting for her mother to return home from working the midnight shift at a post office. It was two months before she saw her mother again. Haddish’s mum had been in a car wreck that had left her unable to speak, walk or eat. (In the book, Haddish claims her stepfather would tell her she was lucky to be alive because he’d cut the brake cable, hoping to profit from the insurance gained by killing his entire family.)
Haddish became the de facto parent to her step-siblings while being verbally and physically abused by her mother, who was now suffering from schizophrenia. A public altercation that culminated in Mrs Haddish hitting a baby with a plank of wood resulted in her being sectioned in state mental care for two years while Tiffany was put in various foster homes, where she was routinely abused and assaulted.
It’s a harrowing backstory that would lead, in most cases, to a bleak future. Haddish attributes her survival to an unexpected source. “I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” she says. “There’s a scene in that movie where the detective says to the rabbit: ‘Why are the people doing this for you?’ And the rabbit goes: ‘Because I make them laugh. Make people laugh, Eddie, and they’ll do anything for you.’ And I’m like: ‘This is how I’m going to survive. That’s how I’m going to get kids to do my homework.’ I was kind of like a Charlie Chaplin. I’d fall or I’d bump into things. It worked.”
The Dickensian horror of Haddish’s adolescence – she contracted toxic shock syndrome from an over-absorbent tampon, and hid her inability to read until the age of 15 – briefly halted when a high-school social worker gave her the choice of attending psychiatric therapy or going to Laugh Factory Comedy Camp, a mentorship programme for at-risk teens. She chose the latter. Being around the likes of Richard Pryor, the Wayans brothers, Dane Cook and the voice of Roger Rabbit, Charles Fleischer, made her realise her coping mechanism was an actual talent. “When I first started doing comedy, I was 16,” she says. “I was talking about when you go to a public restroom and older women come in, they always make noises. I talked about being in school and being a mascot, it was very PG. But then I had to stop doing comedy because I ended up homeless …”
Which brings us to the period when the Dickensian horror of Tiffany Haddish’s adolescence resumes. “I was homeless for three months but there were three different times. You know how they say life is full of lessons, and each time you experience something you’re supposed to learn from it, and if you don’t it happens again? Well, it took three times for me and every single time it was about three months of me living in my car.” It also took the intervention of fellow comic Kevin Hart, who gave her $300, told her to get a hotel room and make a list of career goals, to make Haddish start to take her future seriously. Her list began with attainable objectives, such as moving out of her car and into a real apartment. As she kept writing, she let her imagination run free, giving voice to her ambition to work with Will Ferrell, Dave Chappelle and Jada Pinkett Smith. “I learned that I needed to be more honest than I was, more truthful with my comedy,” she says. “I’m really grateful God made Kevin.”
Hart’s angelic intervention focused Haddish and made her a more fearless performer with a unique voice. Her days of poverty may have been consigned to the past but her propensity for extraordinary misfortune was about to make a spectacular comeback. In her autobiography, Haddish’s main memory of her birth father, an Eritrean Jew, is of him head-butting her mother. That did not stop her from wanting to reconnect with him in adult life.
Fate provided the perfect way to find him, in the shape of an ex-cop she had met while on a cruise who was now pestering her for a date. “I was like: ‘Wow, he went to a lot of trouble to find me, maybe he could find my daddy. He said: ‘I can do that but it’s going to cost you.’ I was thinking, I’ll go on a few dates with him, give him a few hundred dollars. But he was like: ‘I want you to marry me.’ I just laughed. I thought, he’s not going to find my daddy. I’ve been looking for him since I was 16. So I said: ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then, three weeks later, he finds my dad, and I’m just like: ‘Woah!’ I mean, I don’t even remember what this guy looks like.”
Haddish married the man she identifies in her book only as fat and ugly but he turned out to be unhealthily possessive and violently jealous. Did she seriously think the way she met him was the foundation for a long-lasting relationship? “I did. I’m a big dreamer. I think anything is possible and I did think I was going to be married to this man for a long time.” After years of being abused and treated like a prisoner in her own home, Haddish managed to extricate herself from his clutches and file for divorce. And then she married him again.
In her book she says: “I won’t get into the details. You would just start yelling at this page.” Rather than yell, I ask if she ever mined this period of her tumultuous personal life for material. “I talked about it quite often in my act,” she says. “I remember the last physical altercation we had. I went up on stage and I’d just come from sitting in court getting a restraining order and my eye was black and there were handprints around my throat. I talked about it and when I came off stage, so many women would relate to me. So many women would tell me to be strong, you never have to return to that. You can do anything.”
Comedy seems to be the one relationship that hasn’t mistreated Haddish. Is her main focus her burgeoning career, or is there room in her life for a family? “In my heart, I would like to think you can have all those things: the kids, the career and everything. But my mind tells me, and my experience tells me, you’re going to have to pick. Would I want a kid? My first thought is no. My second thought is maybe I probably should, just so when I get old there’s someone to take care of me.”
Haddish’s profile is currently so high that she was selected along with a pantheon of rising black stars (including Issa Rae, Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson) to appear in the Alan Yang-directed, Friends-parodying, Jay-Z video for Moonlight. I quiz Haddish, who played Phoebe, about the rumour that she balked at getting into the fountain during their recreation of the iconic opening titles scene because she didn’t want to get her weave wet.
“That is so true!” she laughs. “It wasn’t necessarily about getting my weave wet. It was just about getting wet, period. I was travelling, doing comedy shows. I was thinking about my health. So, yeah, I don’t want to get my hair wet, I’d just had it done. Issa said: ‘Come in with me, let’s just do it.’ I was like: ‘You gotta have one black person who doesn’t get wet because we don’t like to get wet anyway.’ They were like: ‘Get in the fountain,’ and eventually I did get in. But I wouldn’t take my shoes off.” I tell her my first thought on seeing the video was that Friends’ network NBC, should try to make that show a reality. “We talked about that all the time on set, if there could be a black Friends. All of us said we would do it. NBC were probably a little scared but the response has been so great that if I were a network executive, I’d be dying to make that show.”
As our conversation winds down, I try to pay Haddish another compliment. I compare her long, hard road to such rising-from-adversity showbiz films as 8 Mile and congratulate her on the happy ending that is this year. “You have to remember I’m from South Central,” she replies. “I’ve been there all my life. In most areas of LA, people already knew me. The world had no clue. It’s just on a different level. It’s more, strangers saying: ‘I love you, you’re my best friend in my head.’ I’m like: ‘Boo, I’m my best friend, too.’”
The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish is out on 5 December
