I just went into this whole thing about how awesome men are, and how much I love men, which was pretty ironic, considering that the best man I had ever been with in my life lived in a group home for the handicapped.
If I had been a more experienced comedian, I would have talked about that and made a ton of jokes about that, and the crowd would have loved it. But I wasn’t there yet. I was just being antagonizing and awkward.
Lesbian: “We don’t want no dick lovers here!”
I just started laughing at that, mainly because nobody else was laughing, and I was that uncomfortable. They were only laughing when somebody was heckling me, and I was so nervous.
Lesbian: “Get your funky ass off the stage, dick lover.”
Tiffany: “Oh hell no! See, you can heckle me if you want, but don’t be trying to get me off stage. I’mma stay up here my whole time, and I’mma get ALL my money.”
I did that. I stayed on the full fifteen minutes.
When I got off the stage, I felt like a piece of meat. If you think only men can make a woman feel horrible, you don’t know shit about other women. I felt about the worst I had felt in a long time. And the dude I was with, he was no help:
Friend: “Yeah, I don’t know about this. If you get reactions like this all the time, I don’t think you should do comedy.”
I was pretty depressed. I was reconsidering whether this was for me.
Then the promoter handed me fifty bucks.
I just tanked onstage, the worst I have EVER tanked in my comedy life, and I got $50?!?!
This was great!
I knew right then, in the middle of all those lesbians offering me their dildos, that I was gonna do this for the rest of my life.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot, and why I felt like that. How could such a painful, embarrassing moment become the turning point in my life?
When I think about it, I had already made the decision to be a comedian earlier in my life. When I rode that damn bus all day, two days in a row, just to stand in the courtroom, as a fifteen-year-old foster kid that nobody loved. I told the judge that I was gonna be a successful comedian. That was the day I decided in my heart to be a comedian and make people laugh.
But what happened on the Lesbian Bomb Night was that when I did that show, and those women heckled me, and they were laughing at each other’s heckles—people were still laughing. Yeah, the laughing was at my expense, but people laughed, and I was paid.
I got $50 for fifteen minutes. If I could string together, like, even just four fifteen-minute segments per day, I could be making bank!
But it wasn’t just about making money. When I’m onstage, I feel like it’s—it’s where I am supposed to be. It’s who I am. When I am onstage, it’s like this adrenaline rush. You gotta show up and be on and bust your ass, or people will not laugh. And nothing else makes my mind work so fast and so hard. I like that feeling.
Getting paid that night allowed me to imagine a place for myself in the universe doing something I loved.
It’s a risk though. Everything you get on that stage is earned, not given. You don’t know anybody in the room, and you don’t know what these people are gonna laugh at, if they’re gonna like it or not. It’s very scary.
But the weird flip side of this is that I know I’m safe up there. I know they can say whatever they want to, but nobody’s gonna hurt me up there. If somebody does hurt me, it’s gonna be in a room full of witnesses. I just feel the safest there. And even if I bomb and they say terrible things about me, people will laugh at me, and I’ll get paid anyway. In the worst case, I get paid to make people laugh!
And the power that comes with it is intoxicating. It’s better than any drug. As soon as I step my foot out on that stage, all these eyes are on me. I feel like I’m the bravest and safest person in the room. Everybody’s anticipating what I have to say, and I have this power that I don’t have anywhere else. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it feels so fucking good.
And then, when I come off the stage, I’ve got this high. Even when I do bad, I get that high. And then the high starts to come down, but once they hand me my money, then I’m back high again. Whether it was a good experience or a bad experience, I was compensated for it.
That’s validation.
I felt all of this then in a flash—at that moment the guy gave me $50 for doing fifteen minutes of terrible comedy. I knew, at the core of my being, that my job was going to be to get onstage and make people laugh, and get paid for it.
Dating
Dating has been hard for me my whole life, and almost none of the relationships I’ve had have worked out that well. I guess that’s obvious, since I’m still single, as of the writing of this book.
How Comedy Fucks with Relationships
I talk about Roscoe onstage sometimes. That shit does not go over well with some guys. My last boyfriend first heard about Roscoe during a set of mine:
Ex-Boyfriend: “How long did it take you to write that joke?”
Tiffany: “No time at all. I lived that joke.”
Ex-Boyfriend: “You lying, that can’t be true.”
Tiffany: “Oh no—Roscoe is real. That whole story is true.”
Ex-Boyfriend: “FOR REAL? You for real fucked a handicapped dude? I know you got a big heart and everything but GODDAM, Tiffany!”
Tiffany: “So what, it happened years ago.”
Ex-Boyfriend: “You said it was the best sex you ever had! Now I gotta compete with a handicapped dude? What I got to do to be better than him?”
Tiffany: “It’s not about that. It was the passion, the intensity of it all.”
Ex-Boyfriend: “What exactly do you want, do you want me to make my hand like a little dinosaur hand to smack you with my fingertips? Is that what you want? Make funny noises when we fuck? You want me to drool?”
Tiffany: “No, it was Roscoe, it was different, you’re different. You don’t have to be angry—you’re better than Roscoe in other ways.”
That was the wrong thing to say. He went crazy over that shit. Angry, yelling about how much better he was than some handicapped dude who lived in a group home. Shit, I would hope so! If you gotta point that out, you already in trouble.
Later on we were at a store together, and there was a dude working, you could tell he was touched. He was smiling all big and got wide eyes and he came up to us all fast:
Touched Worker: “Y’all need help? I help you, I help you!!”
He was real nice and trying to be helpful, but my ex comes barging between us:
Ex-Boyfriend: “You stand back, Tiffany. Thank you sir, we’re good. You can go away now.”
Touched Worker: “OK cool, if you need help, you ask me!!”
That guy was so nice, and my ex was kind of mean to him.
Ex-Boyfriend: “I know you want to fuck that motherfucker, don’t you Tiffany? I can tell by the way you’re smiling at him. Stop smiling goddam it. I can’t leave you nowhere. You wanna fuck this handicapped dude, I know you would.”
Tiffany: “I might, I might.”
I was kidding—obviously—but he got all angry again.
Ex-Boyfriend: “So you like that in a guy? If Tyson Beckford and a motherfucker missing an arm come in, who are you going to fuck? The motherfucker missing an arm, ain’t you?”