If you don’t yet know who Tiffany Haddish is, your life is about to change for the hilarious.
Girls Trip’s Tiffany Haddish is a comedic genius. This interview proves it.
Watch in awe as she spins a hilarious tale of taking Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith on a Groupon swamp tour.
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
Haddish is currently starring in the new comedy Girls Trip, alongside the much more famous Queen Latifah, Regina Hall, and Jada Pinkett Smith. But virtually every review so far, including Vox’s, has made sure to point out that Haddish steals every scene with her performance as Dina, the movie’s loosest cannon.
But outside of her role in Girls Trip, Haddish is a stellar comedian whose recent work includes the 2016 film Keanu and NBC’s The Carmichael Show. And she showed off her impeccable comic timing on Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, telling the story of how she once got stoned (“the doctor told me to”) and invited her Girls Trip co-star Pinkett Smith and her fairly famous husband Will Smith on a “Groupon swamp tour” while they were filming the movie in New Orleans.
“I thought it’d be super cool ... the alligators would be talking to me, the birds would be singing, the raccoons would be waving — it’d be like I’m in a Disney movie, you know what I’m saying?” she explained to Jimmy Kimmel, who started laughing and basically didn’t stop until the tale ended six minutes later. Haddish apparently didn’t anticipate that the couple would actually take her up on the offer to tour a swamp, leading to one of the more memorable afternoons of her life. (The same seems to hold true for Pinkett Smith, who told the same story — albeit in far less funny detail — to Jimmy Fallon the same night Haddish was on Kimmel.)
What elevates this story from good to great is the way Haddish slyly weaves in the thread of how startled her celebrity tag-alongs were by the experience of mingling with “normal people” for the first time in who knows how long. Haddish manages to skewer her new friends for being out of touch, but with loving amusement, as when she reveals that Pinkett Smith not only didn’t know what a “Groupon” is, but thought it meant that Haddish had “a boat that you could take a group of people on.”
“I was like, ‘Jada, I got a $20 a day rental car. Why would I have my own boat?’” Haddish recounted with a huge grin. “‘I got a discount ticket to get on a swamp, we’re about to have $66 worth of fun, girl.’”
From Jada worrying that Haddish’s rental car without tinted windows might be unsafe (Haddish: “You’re from Baltimore, bitch”) to Will mulling over the idea of buying his own swamp (Haddish: “You’re gonna buy a whole ecosystem?!”), her story of cruising around New Orleans with two of the most famous people in the world is a perfectly administered dose of ridiculousness that shows why Haddish should come out of Girls Trip a star.
