The Last Black Unicorn - Tiffany Haddish Page 0,58
my wife. Even though we’re divorced, she’s still my wife.”
No, we ain’t divorced. We twice divorced.
The Long Road to Comedy Success
I don’t want to make comedy sound easy, because it is NOT.
After I got back into comedy, and got my first paid gig (“The Lesbian Bomb Show”), I started doing a lot of paid shows all over LA. Occasionally, I was getting out of town to Orange County or Colton, or something like that, or far off, like Lancaster.
Back then, I considered a two-hour drive to be a serious traveling gig. I wouldn’t now, but then I was driving a little Geo Metro that sounded like a lawnmower. Ride in that shit for two hours, you feel like you done crossed America in a covered wagon.
Right as I was getting going with comedy, I kind of blew up in the Bar Mitzvah scene. So I was traveling all over the country, doing Bar Mitzvahs. That paid better than my comedy gigs, but comedy was my thing.
Then I got on the show Who’s Got Jokes? and that helped my career a lot. It was my first time ever being on television doing stand-up, and I won the first round of competition.
I had to go to Atlanta, and I had never done comedy in Atlanta before. I’d only partied in Atlanta, so I really didn’t have a feel for the comedy scene. I didn’t know how they even felt about women comedians, or anything. I didn’t have a clue. That shit matters a LOT in comedy, and because I was not ready for the second round in Atlanta, I lost bad.
It was in a civic center. There were like three thousand people there, and it was my first time being in front of that many people. And right as I walked out onstage, I realized, Tiffany, there are motherfucking cameras here.
I was just so nervous, it was horrible.
At the time, I had this goofy bit about the song “Chicken noodle soup, chicken noodle soup, chicken noodle soup and the soda on the side.” I would make fun of that song, do this goofy dance. I did that bit, but I screwed the timing up bad.
I knew I had fucked up. It was so quiet in there. And nobody made a sound. And then some man just went:
Man: “Booo!”
Just out of nowhere. He didn’t even yell, it was more dismissive. And because none of the other three thousand people were making a sound, it echoed all around that hall.
I looked into the audience, and all I could say was one word into the mic, real slow and serious:
Tiffany: “Niggas.”
That’s all I could say. I could get nothing else out of my mouth.
I got disqualified. This wasn’t a black comedy club, and you can’t say that shit on TV. I was done. I failed. It was bad.
First, I cried. I cried outside in the back of the civic center, hard. Then I started talking to myself and was like, You just bombed in front of all them people, all over TV. People are gonna be able to see that all over the world.
Then I responded to myself, Yeah, people gonna see me, though, all over the world. Then, my daddy gonna see me, and then he gonna come visit me, and then life is gonna be great.
I was trying to make myself feel better, and I did feel better.
Even though I bombed, getting to the second round helped my career. I did some stand-up on a couple of late night TV shows, and then I ended up doing HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, and then Def Comedy Jam started getting me other shows.
Then I got a movie with Mike Epps, and that started getting me to colleges. It’s kind of full circle, ’cause NYU wanted to charge me $30,000 a semester to attend, and now, I’m going to all these different colleges, and they’re paying me $2000 to tell jokes for like forty-five minutes. I felt like the dopest person in the world. I was getting paid to go to school. I wasn’t really learning anything, but still.
Once I got divorced, it was like the floodgates opened. The quality of my comedy just got way better. I had more time to focus on the art of it, and I was getting to know myself better. I was paying attention to my feelings about things.
In stand-up, you do need to be having fun up there like Richard Pryor said, but you have to know yourself well,