Tiffany Haddish said she has a good explanation for her disastrous performance at a Miami comedy show that immediately went viral on YouTube and left people who already didn’t like her grinning from ear to ear.
The actress and comedian opened up about what was going on behind the scenes in a new interview on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast. Haddish said that she was “very sick,” right before she went on stage. “I was not my regular self,” she said on the podcast. “I was definitely very sick. I had alcohol poisoning. A part of me wants to say somebody drugged me, but who’s the somebody? It’s probably me,” she conceded.
In clips taken the night of the Miami show, Haddish can be seen forgetting her lines and losing her train of thought on stage. “I remember I wanted to talk about some stuff,” she says in the video, adding “I can’t remember none of it,” as she seems to babble to try and fill the time. “This’ll be the only time you’ll ever see me like this,” she concludes, promising the crowd she’ll never bomb that hard again.
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“It was not a horrible show the whole time,” Haddish said as she reminisced about the moment in the new interview, “but I had never felt that horrible the day after drinking. I thought my organs had fell out my ass,” she said, “my kidneys, liver, everything felt like it was just—Oh my God. I was feeling so like I was dead. It was the worst.” Since then, Haddish has been arrested multiple times on suspicion of drunk driving, and later announced that she has stopped drinking following a court mandate related to the charges, which were ultimately dropped.
Haddish confirmed to Maron she had fallen asleep in her car “both times,” joking that she was used to sleeping in cars since she spent many years living in one early in her career.
During the Miami show, Haddish said she was “on autopilot, not really giving much energy,” as people had already promptly figured out from her onstage ramblings. “I tried at first,” she said, “and it was like my soul was like, ‘Bye bitch, I can’t do this.” She insists she’s made good on her onstage promise never to be give a show that bad again: “I’ve bombed before, but I’ve never bombed like that again,” she added.
As for the vindication the Miami video gave her many detractors online, Haddish said even though her comedian friends told her the vitriol meant that she'd reached a coveted level of fame (“Sinbad called me and said, ‘You made it, Tiffany Haddish. That means you’re a star,’” she told Maron), she couldn’t and still can’t help but trade insults with people who don’t like her online—from an anonymous X/Twitter account.
“I can't help myself,” she said, “I’m like, these people don’t fucking know me. You wanna roast me, let me roast you back.” For example, Haddish said that from her “bogus page,” she’d tweet responses like “How dare you talk about Tiffany Haddish like that and you fat as fuck, you fat sloppy bitch!” She said she has even accused her trolls of “abusing” kids, the same transgression she was accused of in a lawsuit that was eventually settled out of court.
“That’s what you do?” Maron asked.
“Sometimes,” Haddish replied. “It makes me feel better.”
