Comedian Tiffany Haddish was caught off guard when she found out some good news. The Girls Trip actress was working as the host of Kids Say The Darndest Things when she discovered that she won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. Producers shared the information with her as she was talking to two child guests, Lauren and Ava. Soon, Haddish would be overwhelmed with emotion.
“I’ll tell you why I’m crying,” Haddish said to one of the child guests on the show. “It’s a lot of bumpy roads that you cross, right? It’s a lot of times you feel like, ‘Well, am I doing the right thing? Is this really, is this good enough? Am I good enough? Am I strong enough to do this job? And then you just have to believe in yourself as much as you can, and against all odds you say you know what, I’m gonna just put my best foot forward and I’m gonna give the world the best that I got, right? And then, you just hope that people like it.”
Haddish, who has experienced the trauma of being separated from her parent and was shuffled around the foster care system, absorbed the moment of not only winning the Grammy, but for simultaneously receiving a huge amount of letters from children all around the world who wanted to share a piece of their lives with the bubbly celebrity.
“When you get nominated — I was so happy just with that, but then even more happy that the same day I got nominated all these kids wrote me these letters, which made me even more happy because I always just wanted to be a person that brought joy to other people, ” Haddish said. “I know what it feels like to be sad and to feel hurt.”
Haddish won the category that consisted of Bill Burr for Paper Tiger, Jim Gaffigan for The Pale Tourist, Patton Oswalt for I Love Everything, and Jerry Seinfield for 23 Hours to Kill. In the last six years, female comedians, such as Ellen DeGeneres, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Margaret Cho, and Lisa Lampanelli, were nominated, but did not win over their male counterparts.
The number of Black female comedians that have won a Grammy are also few and far in between. Bill Cosby was one of the first Black comedians to win the award, taking home the Grammy in six consecutive years, including 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. In 1986, Whoopi Goldberg would become the first Black female comedian to nab a Grammy for her original Broadway Show recording Whoopi Goldberg.
Goldberg laid out a great blueprint for Black female comedians and female comedians, period. Following her Grammy win, she would go on to be nominated for Best Actress for her role in the 1986 film The Color Purple. In 1991, she would win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the pic Ghost. Goldberg has also nabbed two Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes , and one Tony Award — one of the only comedian actors to do so. Today, Goldberg hosts the morning talk show The View. It looks like Haddish is on the same path. Her acting credits are steadily growing and she is already doing a bit of television hosting.
