‘Tiffany Haddish: She Ready!’ Proves This Scene Stealer Is More Than Ready For Hollywood

Introduced as “the black unicorn,” Tiffany Haddish sashays her way onstage to open her first solo stand-up comedy special, and closes it by spreading her joy and newfound success across the audience and into the camera. And don’t mind Haddish for wanting to live it up.  Even if she apologizes for it sometimes. “Sorry, I really just wanted to be ratchet for 10 seconds,” Haddish jokes at the start of her hour. “It feels good, though. I feel like I’ve come a long way.”

Currently available on Showtime Anytime, Tiffany Haddish: She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood! shows just how far Haddish has come in the past 25 years. Not just from the hood to Hollywood, but also from foster care to movie star, as her scene-stealing turn in this summer’s hit movie, Girls Trip, has rocketed her to new heights of fame.

She just completed three seasons on NBC’s The Carmichael Show, and will co-star this fall opposite Tracy Morgan in the upcoming TBS sitcom, The Last O.G., so yes, 2017 is most definitely Haddish’s year.

But before her career broke big, before comedy, Haddish joked that she was just another swap-meet model “with all the best ratchet poses.”

Comedy provided Haddish with a way out of a troubled childhood that included growing up in foster care from age 11. Haddish told me all about it last year in my podcast, Last Things First, including finding the Laugh Factory Comedy Camp as a teenager and later overcoming a period when she had to sleep in her car.

But here, for Showtime, it’s all kept light. The tetherball court at school provided her with opportunities to release tension and also fight back against a bully. And Haddish jokes that each of her foster families, from the Hispanic family to the Jewish family and later her grandmother’s custody all taught her valuable lessons that come in handy to this day. “I feel like a well-rounded individual.” Even if Grandma’s allegory about treating the female body like a house may have come two years too late for Haddish to put it to best use.

Haddish jokes about how her relative poverty might have cost her the chance to study at New York University, but that YouTube University has a how-to video for anything you might need to learn. “I don’t want to owe nobody nothing,” she says.

Haddish’s romantic relationships might not have started on the right feet, but she set those young men straight in the end. And as if starring in her own Los Angeles version of Braveheart, she told her now ex-husband that she would never let comedy fall by the wayside. As she put it: “You can take the pussy but you can’t take the comedy.” That breakup left her homeless, “but classy homeless.” The kind of homeless where she maintains nice nails, a steady batch of baby wipes, free meals and drinks from the comedy club, and then sleeping at night in Beverly Hills — albeit in her packed Geo Metro.

Her encounter outside the Laugh Factory one night with Kevin Hart is telling, not only for how he ended up helping her, but also in his initial male-centric advice for her.

In the end, everything has more than worked out for Haddish.

In a world where Caitlyn Jenner could be “woman of the year” before even being a woman for a year, a white woman could lead an NAACP chapter, and Donald Trump could become president, Haddish figures anything is possible. As she described her childhood in foster care: “I can find the beauty in anything.” So, too, now she envisions, more timely than ever this week: “I could be the leader of the KKK. Wouldn’t that be some s—?” Of course, give Haddish the chance to reform the Ku Klux Klan and she has plenty of new rules for them.

There’s a moment almost 48 minutes into the 66-minute performance in which Haddish acknowledges she needs to make sure to straighten out her own life, and while doing so, picks up a choker that had fallen on the floor in one fluid movement without interrupting her flow. Only acknowledging it afterward as another sign of her strength.

At the time she recorded this set for Showtime, she had just filmed Girls Trip, and relays an amusing anecdote from a break in production when she could take her co-star Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith along for a swamp tour in Louisiana. Before they head out, Jada Pinkett Smith had told Haddish: “When this movie come out you’re going to be considered an A-list actress.”

Consider this yet another item crossed off of Haddish’s dream list of goals.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Tiffany Haddish: She Ready on Showtime or Showtime Anytime