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The Rise And Stumble Of Tiffany Haddish

By Brian Richards | Celebrity | April 26, 2023 |

By Brian Richards | Celebrity | April 26, 2023 |

GettyImages-1390749362-e1650554933675.jpg

It’s never easy or pleasant when an artist whose work you enjoy and appreciate, an artist who arouses your intellect as well as your loins, ends up being such a massive disappointment. All because they don’t know or don’t care that shutting the f-ck up is free, or because they care more about themselves and what they want than they do about doing the right thing. Most of us are still reeling from what we now know about Jonathan Majors. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong have seen their reputations take a major blow after working with David Choe on the Netflix series Beef, which was then followed by the Internet being reminded of Choe’s alleged history of sexual assault. (Before you say, “But he was making that story up! It was just a joke!” let me remind you that cracking jokes with your friends and with your millions of listeners about how you forced a woman to have sex with you is absolutely not funny, and Choe thinking that anything about this was funny or cool doesn’t make this any better.) The less said about Johnny Depp (and the many other celebrities who also thought it was necessary to support him and crack jokes about his abuse of Amber Heard), the better.

Which unfortunately brings us to Tiffany Haddish.

Haddish first appeared on the stand-up comedy competition series Bill Bellamy’s Who’s Got Jokes?, and after that, she went on to do guest spots on shows such as New Girl, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, My Name Is Earl, That’s So Raven, and The Carmichael Show, as well as roles in the films Meet The Spartans and Janky Promoters before scoring a major role opposite Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in the 2016 comedy Keanu.

The following year, Haddish appeared in the comedy Girls Trip, which also starred Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Queen Latifah. She played Dina, the member of the ‘Flossy Posse’ who refuses to bite her tongue when something needs to be said, and who loves to have a good time alongside her friends, whether it involves hallucinating while drunk on absinthe, or teaching them how to get better at oral sex by using a grapefruit. (She also made it impossible to read or hear the word “bootyhole” without hearing it said in Haddish’s voice.)

The film received glowing reviews and was a box-office hit, and much of the credit for Girls Trip’s success went to Haddish’s performance as Dina. Not long after the film’s release, people couldn’t stop talking about Haddish, about how hilarious she is, and how they wanted to see her in all of the things. She even appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote Girls Trip, and charmed the hell out of Stephen from the moment she walked out to take her seat.

Haddish remained booked and busy, as she went on to appear in films such as Night School, Like A Boss, and The Kitchen, which gave Haddish her first dramatic role as the wife of an Irish-American gangster who joins her friends in running the neighborhood and taking over their husbands’ operations after they are all arrested by the FBI. She also took on roles in several television shows, including The Last O.G., Spongebob Squarepants, Tuca & Bertie, Bob’s Burgers, and even appeared on Drunk History. In 2018, she won the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her episode of Saturday Night Live and a Grammy in 2021 for her comedy album, Black Mitzvah.

Upon reading this, and being reminded of her numerous accomplishments, some of you are probably wondering, “What the hell did Tiffany Haddish even do to have you write about her like she’s another disappointment?” Well, this is the part where I answer your question.

Let’s go back to her 2018 interview with GQ, in which she shared her belief, and shared it with her whole-ass chest, that drinking a teaspoon of turpentine will help you remain healthy.

An offshoot of Haddish’s goal-oriented nature is that she enjoys soliciting and giving life-improvement tips—a trait that makes her a captivating, natural spokeswoman. She is as confident and specific with her counsel as a spam e-mail, and she can be unnervingly persuasive—even when her advice is to drink poison.

“A teaspoon of turpentine will not kill you,” says Haddish with the breezy confidence of an unlicensed doctor. “The government doesn’t want you to know that if you have a cold, just take some turpentine with some sugar or castor oil or honey and it’ll go away the next day.”

I didn’t think humans could consume turpentine.

“Honey,” begins Haddish, “back during slavery—let me teach you something, okay?”

Per Haddish, in the absence of 19th-century medical care, slaves drank turpentine—an oil distilled from pine resin, today commonly used as a paint thinner—as a cure-all for various ailments. When I note that slaves were not known for their excellent health, Haddish flips my argument into evidence: That’s because not all the slaves had access to turpentine.

“There’s worms inside your body,” says Haddish.

How—

“There are worms inside your body.”

Haddish explains that she learned about the alleged medical benefits of turpentine on YouTube and purchased some on Amazon a few months ago.

After her first dose, she says, “everything just felt so much better, clarity-wise.”

You were light-headed from drinking poison.

“But I was killing the game onstage!” she says, laughing. “My thought patterns was coming quick, quick, quick. Girl, you just look it up. Just do the research.”

I do look it up, because I’m genuinely worried America’s brightest new star may be inadvertently poisoning herself to death. I send Haddish information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine outlining the dangers of turpentine poisoning, but when we talk again a few days after our whale watch, she is unconcerned. “The government wrote it,” she says of the research. “Honey.”

She vows to update me on her health following her next doctor’s appointment. The other thing Haddish says about turpentine: It will make your body pass “the best doo-doo of your fucking life.”

Yeah. I wish I had made that sh-t up, but it was real.

Do you remember Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking app that made its debut during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed people to talk to each other in specific chat rooms, right before Twitter jacked that idea for themselves and turned it into Spaces? Well, in 2021, there was one chatroom on Clubhouse that included Haddish, Joe Budden, The Game (the rapper, mind you, not Triple H going by his other nickname), and a conspiracy theorist named Chakabars, as they all expressed their belief that COVID-19 was a virus created by the U.S. government in order to control its citizens and invade their privacy. When a Black female doctor joined the chat to tell them how wrong and inaccurate this theory was, Haddish and her cohorts lashed out at her relentlessly. As part of her mission to ruin this doctor’s life, Haddish allegedly found the doctor’s address and doxxed her. This apparently led to this woman having suicidal ideations as a result of this intense harassment. Word of this incident spread throughout Black Twitter, and they were unable to look at Tiffany Haddish the same way again ever since.

More recent incidents have reminded people why they no longer have any patience for Haddish. The worst one, by far, is when it came to light that Haddish and stand-up comic Aries Spears had filmed several comedy skits with two children (ages 7 and 14) that were sexually suggestive, and involved Haddish using a submarine sandwich to simulate oral sex. (You can look for those videos if you want to, but you sure as hell won’t find them here.) Both Haddish and Spears were named in a lawsuit last August and were accused of coercing the two children into appearing in those skits, but the lawsuit was dismissed a month later due to Jane Doe (the woman who originally filed the lawsuit, and who was 14 when she filmed the skits) choosing to withdraw. From NBCNews.com:

The woman, identified in the original claim as Jane Doe, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to TMZ, she said Tuesday that “we are glad that we can all put this behind us.”

“My family and I have known Tiffany Haddish for many years — and we now know that she would never harm me or my brother or help anyone else do anything that could harm us,” the statement said.

Attorneys for Haddish did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Spears also did not respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Aug. 30 and moved to federal court a week and a half later, alleges Haddish and Spears separately coerced the siblings when they were children to take part in sexually explicit skits. It claims their participation “stole the youth of a 7-year-old child and a 14-year-old child.”

Jane Doe, 22, filed the suit on behalf of herself and her younger brother, who is still a juvenile.

Six days after the lawsuit was filed, Haddish posted a message on Instagram expressing regret for her role in one of the comedy pieces.

“While this sketch was intended to be comedic, it wasn’t funny at all — and I deeply regret having agreed to act in it,” Haddish said in the Sept. 5 post.

The siblings’ mother had a close relationship with Haddish, the star of “Girls Trip” and several other films, when they were both children, according to the lawsuit.

Earlier this month, fashion designer/shady-as-hell judge on the unfortunately canceled HBO Max series Legendary Law Roach once shared an anecdote about his interactions with Haddish, and how those interactions blew up in his face like a land mine.

(When you’re confronting anyone about questionable and dishonest behavior they’ve shown toward you? And you know all about it because you got the tea from someone you know? I promise you that no one else needs to know about who clued you in, and who served you this tea in the first place. Not unless you want your cup to remain empty because you refuse to learn the art of keeping a secret.)

Someone on Twitter couldn’t help but notice that Haddish picked the most interesting hills to die on when it comes to certain celebrities. First, there was this deleted tweet regarding Jonathan Majors.

Then there was the fact that this tweet by accused rapist/human trafficker Andrew Tate was saved in Haddish’s Twitter Likes.

The hits just kept on coming, with anecdotes about Haddish being shared and recirculated on social media. Rapper Vic Mensa’s 2019 appearance on the Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson podcast, in which he revealed that she had sexually assaulted him when the two first met and discussed possibly working on an album together. (To hear Mike Tyson, of all people, immediately respond to this claim with, “That don’t count?” The ironing is delicious.)

Marlon Wayans was seen in a clip from Ellen when Haddish was guest host, where he explained that, despite the two of them being longtime friends, why she’s never been cast in any movies with him or with his family.

A portion of Issa Rae’s interview on Hot Ones was shared in which Issa talked about how Haddish met a male cast member from Insecure and was being way too forward in how she chose to flirt with him.

Since I started this by talking about celebrities who seem strangely eager to make fun of other celebrities who are victims of domestic violence, a comedy skit called “Rihanna’s Revenge” was dug up in which Haddish (along with comedian Kenny Johnson) made light of Rihanna being physically abused by Chris Brown.

If you ask Black Twitter, the fact that Tiffany Haddish couldn’t keep her mouth shut about someone biting Beyoncé on the cheek despite signing a non-disclosure agreement, and that someone allegedly being Sanaa Lathan, is probably why Beyoncé no longer f-cks with her or invites her to any more hangouts. (Some of them are even convinced that Haddish is the one who actually bit Beyoncé, and that she just accused Sanaa of doing it to take the attention off of herself.)

Despite all of this, Haddish’s career hasn’t come to a complete standstill just yet, as she has two films scheduled to be released this year: Haunted Mansion (which will be the second live-action film based on Disney’s theme park attraction), and Back on the Strip, about an aspiring magician who ends up crossing paths with a group of Black male strippers. (hears the cast of Magic Mike XXL clear their throats) Excuse me, I meant to say, male entertainers! And she will also be returning in the second season of the Apple TV+ series The Afterparty, which premieres in July.

None of this has stopped social media from expressing their thoughts on how Tiffany Haddish seems to think that being tactless is the same thing as being funny, that she runs her mouth a hell of a lot more than she should, and that she has fumbled a lot of bags that deserve to be picked up by fellow comedian/actress Janelle James, who has impressed numerous critics and viewers with her role as principal Ava Coleman on the ABC series Abbott Elementary. This is most likely why Haddish has locked her Twitter page and gone private, if only to keep more people from hopping into her mentions to remind her how much she has f-cked up.

Whether or not Haddish will ever win back the respect of those fans, and achieve the level of popularity that she did after Girls Trip, still remains a mystery. But judging from her recent Twitter activity, if she really is serious about showing support toward men like Jonathan Majors and Andrew Tate, despite everything that has come to light about them? Someone should really warn her that Black women who feel the need to go down that road by saying ridiculous sh-t to get everyone’s attention, and acting more conservative in terms of who and what they support, will certainly not lead to anything good. Just ask Stacey Dash.