She Must Be Joking

Tiffany Haddish is the rare celebrity who says exactly what’s on her mind. We get in the head of comedy’s new reigning queen.

- Rawiya Kameir

Since Tiffany Haddish’s, 38, breakout role in last year’s Girls Trip, she has voiced a very specific aspiration: to set up a community centre for young people raised in foster care, as she herself was. She imagines building it on two intersecting streets, ‘Tiffany’ and ‘Haddish’. The actress doesn’t have children of her own, but she wants to be “a mentor, a mother, a guide,” she says. Tiffany was born in LA, US, to an American mother and an Eritrean father, who left the family when she was three. When she was eight, her mother was in a car accident that caused a brain injury and eventually a mental illness, turning her violent towards Tiffany, who assumed the role of stand-in parent to her four younger siblings. Five years later, they all ended up in foster care, and Tiffany was separated from the others. When she was 15, a social worker attempted to address behavioural issues – Tiffany hadn’t learnt to read beyond grade-one level and often acted out to distract from that deficiency – by sending her to a comedy camp at the Laugh Factory. If you look hard enough, you can find a video of her from that time, trying on her wild-eyed, slapstick style. One bit, in which she describes assembling up two old TVs – one for sound, one for picture – could fit right into her 2017 comedy special, She Ready! Even now, just beneath her exuberance, a past defined by poverty and mistreatment still figures into her performances. “The only time I didn’t want to cry was when I was laughing,” she says. “I’ve got all these jokes about my mom, and what I’m joking about, like her abuse and all this stuff, it’s painful.” Years later, Tiffany reconciled with her mother, even setting her up in an apartment where her sister – who received training to take care of people with mental instabilities – lives with her.