She Must Be Joking

Tiffany Haddish is the rare celebrity who says exactly what’s on her mind. Rawiya Kameir gets in the head of comedy’s new queen.

IN AN INDUSTRIAL POCKET OF the Bronx, sandwiched between a wastewater-treatment facility and an MTA lot, is a tiny road named Tiffany Street. On a humid summer afternoon, Tiffany Haddish is three short blocks away, eating an Egg White Delight McMuffin and hash browns in a bare, windowless conference room that has been designated for our interview. Since Haddish’s breakout role in last year’s Girls Trip, she has voiced a very specific aspiration: to set up a community center 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. So when I tell her about the homonymous street nearby, her slender eyebrows climb upward. “I have to go take some pictures right there!” she says.

Haddish was born in Los Angeles 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 toward Haddish, who assumed the role of de facto parent to her four younger siblings. Five years later, they all ended up in foster care, and Haddish was separated from the others. When she was fifteen, a social worker attempted to address behavioral issues—Haddish hadn’t learned to read beyond a first-grade level and often acted out to distract from that deficiency—by sending her to a comedy camp at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles.