The gift that is the ongoing career rise of Tiffany Haddish opened up once more with some of the comic and actor’s signature Hollywood encounter tales on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night. Telling Kimmel that none of her new movie star pals has anything to truly worry about when she hosts the MTV Movie Awards on Monday (“All love through my jokes... but they will be funny,” she promised), Haddish was her name-dropping, thoroughly delightful self. Asked by Kimmel if celebrities are wary of hanging out with her lest they become talk show or standup fodder, Haddish told the host there was, in fact, a Haddish vault of secrets for the truly off-limits stuff she’s seen, and that, as she said, “I don’t wanna hang out with people who are worried about hanging out with me, ’cause obviously you doin’ something you ain’t got no business.” Fair enough, although we have to know what’s the story behind her allusion the having the digits of one handsome young actor. “I got it from him,” smiled Haddish, “He just don’t remember.”
Haddish’s unabashed glorying in her rags-to-well-deserved-riches story remains a bright spot on any late-night show she appears on, with the ongoing saga of her encounter with number one famous guy crush Leonardo DiCaprio taking on more and more hilarious detail each time she tells it. Here, however, things got a bit more ... specific. Telling the delighted Kimmel that she’s dead freaking serious about wanting to get with DiCaprio, Haddish embroidered her fantasy with an anecdote about telling Leo himself that, should they get together (something about which, it should be repeated, Haddish is not playing), there would have to be a roleplaying element with DiCaprio in character as a certain, perhaps surprising, even problematic, early role. “I like my men a little weak,” Haddish told Kimmel, adding that her true motivation for the pick was to give the object of her affection the award she felt he should have gotten. It’s all about giving back, people.