The Last Black Unicorn - Tiffany Haddish Page 0,40
sure is leaning in close to each other.”
Tiffany: “Oh, they probably can’t hear each other over the music.”
I came out onto the stage, all excited and ready to give my fifteen-minute set. I’d been practicing and refining it at open mics. My jokes were all about dating and having a man, and this woman yelled out:
Woman: “I bet you I can fuck you better than your man!”
I was like, What did she say? I just stood there confused for a second, because I just did not believe she could have said that. Then I kept going with another joke about a man. Then some other woman yelled out:
Woman: “We don’t want to hear about no men. Damn, baby. Your body look good. You fine! Let’s talk about that!”
I’d been interrupted twice now, and I was too confused to keep going, so I blurted out, kind of kidding:
Tiffany: “What is this? A lesbian event or some shit?”
Everybody in unison was like, “Yeah.”
Tiffany: “Oh, shit! Nobody told me this shit!”
That got a big laugh. I was so uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do, so I just did what I always do when I’m uncomfortable: I made shit WAY WORSE.
I started talking about dick even more, and then I just kept talking about dick. I was going on about all the dicks, and then some woman blurts out:
Lesbian: “I got a drawer full of dicks for you, and you can pick any one you want, baby!”
That got the best laugh yet from the crowd.
Tiffany: “Okay, no. I was talking about one that is actually attached to a man. I love men. Let me tell you about men and they dicks!”
I just went into this whole thing about how awesome men are, and how much I love men, which was pretty ironic, considering that the best man I had ever been with in my life lived in a group home for the handicapped.
If I had been a more experienced comedian, I would have talked about that and made a ton of jokes about that, and the crowd would have loved it. But I wasn’t there yet. I was just being antagonizing and awkward.
Lesbian: “We don’t want no dick lovers here!”
I just started laughing at that, mainly because nobody else was laughing, and I was that uncomfortable. They were only laughing when somebody was heckling me, and I was so nervous.
Lesbian: “Get your funky ass off the stage, dick lover.”
Tiffany: “Oh hell no! See, you can heckle me if you want, but don’t be trying to get me off stage. I’mma stay up here my whole time, and I’mma get ALL my money.”
I did that. I stayed on the full fifteen minutes.
When I got off the stage, I felt like a piece of meat. If you think only men can make a woman feel horrible, you don’t know shit about other women. I felt about the worst I had felt in a long time. And the dude I was with, he was no help:
Friend: “Yeah, I don’t know about this. If you get reactions like this all the time, I don’t think you should do comedy.”
I was pretty depressed. I was reconsidering whether this was for me.
Then the promoter handed me fifty bucks.
I just tanked onstage, the worst I have EVER tanked in my comedy life, and I got $50?!?!
This was great!
I knew right then, in the middle of all those lesbians offering me their dildos, that I was gonna do this for the rest of my life.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot, and why I felt like that. How could such a painful, embarrassing moment become the turning point in my life?
When I think about it, I had already made the decision to be a comedian earlier in my life. When I rode that damn bus all day, two days in a row, just to stand in the courtroom, as a fifteen-year-old foster kid that nobody loved. I told the judge that I was gonna be a successful comedian. That was the day I decided in my heart to be a comedian and make people laugh.
But what happened on the Lesbian Bomb Night was that when I did that show, and those women heckled me, and they were laughing at each other’s heckles—people were still laughing. Yeah, the laughing was at my expense, but people laughed, and I was paid.
I got $50 for fifteen minutes. If I could string together, like, even just four fifteen-minute segments per day, I could be making