Tiffany Haddish Has Responded After Bombing Stand-Up Set

Tiffany Haddish Girls Trip

If you are a comedian, especially a professional comedian, you will bomb at least once in your life; it is bound to happen. Falling short is an inevitable certainty of comedy. Whether it is a bad crowd, the comic is having a bad night, or you are getting heckled mercilessly by someone looming in the shadows of the audience, there will be a time in every comedian's life when the jokes simply do not land. That is ultimately what happened to Tiffany Haddish in Miami during a rough New Year's Eve stand-up set.

During the doomed stand-up performance, Tiffany Haddish reportedly had troubled remembering some of her jokes, and she delivered a few more reading from her iPad. And the jokes she did remember allegedly weren't hitting the crowd's funny bones. The end of 2018 stand-up show came off as unprepared and unprofessional, according to the report from The Root, and there were several people in the audience who walked out during the set.

While bad sets are not uncommon, especially in the tumultuous world of stand-up comedy, it's rare for an A-list stand-up comedian to fall flat on their face during such a big show in a big stadium. In this case, the wonky stand-up set was performed to a huge audience at the James L. Knight Center, which makes the embarrassment of failing to live up to the hype all the more nerve-wracking. But Tiffany Haddish is an honest person. One of the reasons she is as famous as she is is because she is completely, totally herself. Sure enough, Haddish spoke out about the bad set.

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While sharing The Root article mentioned above, Tiffany Haddish admits on Twitter that the trouble stand-up set did happen (though there was no question of that; there was video everywhere of the less than stellar comedy performance), and she wishes it was better than it ultimately was. Alas, Haddish hopes she never has to bomb quite that badly again. Certainly, no comedian wants to deal with something like this again, although it could still happen; her career is still young.

Perhaps the biggest issue that will arise from this failed stand-up set is that it will provide fuel to the fire when it comes to her ongoing public dispute with fellow comedian Katt Williams. Williams has publicly spoken out against Tiffany Haddish, claiming she has "not proven the ability" to perform an hour's worth of stand-up, and he claims she hasn't proven the chance to tell jokes back-to-back, maintaining that other people wrote her career-defining jokes in Girls Trip. While that's not true, as Haddish released an hour-long stand-up special for Showtime in 2017, this incident is not helping her case.

Hopefully, Tiffany Haddish knocks it out of the park the next time she does a stand-up set. If nothing else, this very public bombing will hopefully make sure she never comes onto the stage unprepared again. And if you want to look on the bright side, this failed set will likely give her some new material!

Will Ashton

Will is an entertainment writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. His writing can also be found in The Playlist, Cut Print Film, We Got This Covered, The Young Folks, Slate and other outlets. He also co-hosts the weekly film/TV podcast Cinemaholics with Jon Negroni and he likes to think he's a professional Garfield enthusiast.