Tiffany Barber is sitting quietly in front of her laptop at the North End’s Black Coffee Cafe when I arrive to meet her. She greets me with a hug like a long-lost auntie. I halfway expect her to say “What up doe!!” like she does on her Instagram videos, but her natural voice is softer and upbeat — with just a touch of hood.
You may know Barber better as T Barb, the comedian who makes those “Only in Detroit” voiceover videos showing random sights of the Motor City like guys riding in a car with no doors.
“What up doe!! Only in Detroit do we give a new meaning to the word ‘buzzing,’” she says in a video of a sex toy vibrating in a circle in a rain puddle as the theme from Unsolved Mysteries plays. “It’s some girl digging in a City Trends purse right now mad as hell.”
Her “Eastside Power Ranger” series of a man dressed as the Black Ranger at the corner of Cadieux and Harper is one of her most popular, with nearly 50,000 likes. The content in the videos is real, but T Barb’s commentary is what takes them to the next level. It’s the epitome of reality being stranger than fiction, with just a touch of embellishment.
“‘Only in Detroit’ presents another exciting episode of Eastside Power Ranger,” she says in one episode, singing the words like it’s the theme song for a spin-off of the ’90s TV show. A shirtless man taunts the Black Ranger in the middle of the street, smashing what looks like a long piece of wood on the ground. “As you can see, today we have a villain… but he’s no match for Eastside Power Ranger or that Suburban because guess what? He has the thrifty tools to keep us all safe on the east side of Detroit. Get ready, get ready. HADOUKEN,” she says as the “power ranger” throws a piece of concrete at the “villain.”
“You’d be surprised at the things that you see just riding through the city,” T Barb says back at the coffee shop. “People always say, ‘How did you see that?’ I don’t know! Then you get flack, with people saying, ‘Oh, you’re making fun of these people,’ but they are doing it for the notoriety. If you on the corner and you dressed up as a Power Ranger, you probably wouldn’t mind if a billion people saw you actin’ a fool.”
T Barb has been a stand-up comedian for seven years but says she started making the Only in Detroit videos just a few years ago. Initially, they were green-screen TikToks, but she came up with her trademark voice and catchphrase as she started posting more consistently.
At first, she would come across random things and record them herself, but now people send her videos. She also uses content from Instagram media pages like Crime News in the D and Metro Detroit News.
“You know, ‘Let’s get ready to rumble?’” she says, mimicking legendary boxing announcer Michael Buffer. “I did a couple like that and then I wanted to put my own spin on it, so I came up with ‘What up doe!!’ … It’s kinda like if I was a news reporter reporting this on hood news. If you’ve ever watched L.A. traffic videos [where] they got the helicopter man, when they’re chasing people the commentary is next level. It’s so serious, but it’s funny because it’s serious, so that’s kinda how I do the videos.”
Retired hoodrat?
T Barb considers herself a “retired hoodrat,” though she makes sure to point out that “relapse is a part of recovery.” She switches in and out of character without blinking throughout our long conversation and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a joke and what’s not.
Barber grew up on Joy Road and says she didn’t have the best upbringing. Her parents met fresh out of prison and her mother struggled with mental health issues, which landed her back behind bars several times.
“I grew up real hood — gang banging, fighting, and all that kind of stuff,” she remembers. “I started making jokes as a defense mechanism. You know, I grew up when ‘Yo Mama’s on Crack Rock’ was out. So imagine yo mama really was on crack rock and then here comes the song and it’s like, we bout to scrap. So it’s either let’s laugh or imma beat your ass. Which one you want? You wanna be friends or imma stomp you? At that time, I lacked emotional intelligence.”
After high school, she caught a Greyhound bus to New Orleans and attended Dillard University where she says she “discovered a new way of life.” There, she studied to become a social worker so she could help kids who came from troubled families.
“My mother grew up in foster care and I think that caused a lot of her issues, so I thought I’d be a community advocate,” she says.
So she moved back to Detroit and worked for Wayne County for about 14 years in foster care and protective services.
“I was still goofy even on the job,” she remembers. “I felt like I understood people. If I come over to your house from protective services and I walk off the porch and we all laughing, that means I got a gift... You know any time child protective services is coming to your house, it’s not a good, happy thing.”
She adds, more seriously, “I’ve bought people hotel rooms. I’ve bought people food because they didn’t have nothing. Who wants to take somebody’s kids because they can’t afford to feed them? I’m not making light of it, but it’s true. It was a lot of stuff I probably would have gotten in trouble for but my thing is, if all you need is a ride over your auntie’s house because your lights got cut off then I’m gone take you over there… After doing it for 14 years, it was just a lot.”
T Barb got her first taste of comedy when a fellow social worker who did stand up on the side invited her to a show. Entranced by the stage and laughter from the audience, T Barb asked if she could try it, so her friend gave her a three-minute spot at the former Maccabees Trader on Woodward, which is now a Shield’s Pizza.
“It was a Friday and I invited everybody I knew, crackheads included,” T Barb says. “I already talk fast because I definitely got a little ADD… I had like 27 minutes of jokes that I put in that three minutes. After that, I was like ‘I really wanna do this’ and I never stopped.”
In addition to being a social worker and exploring her newfound love for stand-up, T Barb had another side hustle — a hot dog cart called “Delicious Dogs” that she ran in downtown Detroit for 15 years. She started in Cadillac Square, moved to Randolph Street, and then switched to private events after the pandemic.
“I just did [an event] yesterday in a girl’s backyard,” she says. “People always recognize me like, ‘Is that T Barb?’ Yes, bitch, now do you want a hot sausage or Italian? Ketchup or mustard?”
She adds, “I’m the hot dog princess,” noting that she’s actually vegan.
T Barb did stand up for about a year before she decided to leave her job with Wayne County. She kept doing shows locally, grew her social media presence, and started booking tours for herself. When we meet for coffee, she’s just gotten back from Los Angeles where she did a string of gigs. She averages anywhere from five to 25 stand-up shows a month, but still says, “I ain’t made it big yet!”
Family ties
Besides having a natural knack for making people laugh, T Barb is also breaking a generational curse.
“I would have been the third generation of people incarcerated in my family,” she says. “One of my grandmothers was institutionalized, the other one went to prison, both of my parents went to prison. So we were the first generation not to go to prison or be institutionalized. I love laughing, I love smiling, and I’m just happy to be here.”
She also has family ties to comedy that she didn’t realize when she first started performing. It turns out her great grandparents were the 1930s-era comedic duo and vaudeville act Butterbeans and Susie.
She didn’t know about them until her aunt, shocked that T Barb was now a comedian, called her one day.
“She said, ‘I can’t believe this. I just wanted to share this with you,’” T Barb says. “My aunt is 73 and for one Christmas she made me a binder with their whole history, their CDs, all the newspaper clippings she had been saving. They sang songs together, and they have one called ‘I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll.’ Yes, they was nasty freaks back then in the 1930s.”
The lyrics read like an old-timey version of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”:
BUTTERBEANS: Come and let me straighten you out
Now here’s a dog that's long and lean
SUSIE: Oh-oh, that ain’t the kind of dog I mean
BUTTERBEANS: Now here’s a dog, Sue, that’s short and fat
SUSIE: But I sure need somethin’ different from that
By working as a standup comedian, T Barb feels she’s continuing her family’s legacy. And yes, some of her jokes can get dirty.
The irony isn’t lost on T Barb that she’s a comedian who runs a hot dog cart and whose great grandparents made naughty vaudeville songs about one stuffing their hot dog in the other’s roll. The joke just writes itself.
And yet, innuendos aside, T Barb still finds a way to give back to her community. Her nonprofit T Barb and Friends does a yearly hygiene drive for a different underfunded school every year where they collect items for students like deodorant, toothpaste, menstrual products, laundry detergent, and quarters for the laundromat.
It goes back to her being a social worker and wanting to help people, but it’s also personal as she knows how embarrassing it can be to go to school without clean clothes.
“A lot of kids are coming to school and aren’t performing well because they have hygiene issues,” she says. “We didn’t have a washing machine so I used to wash my jeans in the tub. Do you know how hard it is to get soap out of jeans? I’m talking like Farmer Jack overalls, trying to rinse Palmolive dish soap out because we didn’t have the right soap. So just thinking back, I’m like, it’s somebody else going through that now.”
T Barb and Friends also hosts an event where they feed the homeless and give away clothing around Thanksgiving and Christmas every year.
“I grew up on hand-me-downs,” she says. “We never really had a lot of new stuff like furniture growing up and I remember all of that. If somebody wouldn’t have given us an extra bed, I probably would have been sleeping on the floor.”
Despite her community efforts, more people know T Barb for her stand-up and silly voiceovers than her good deeds or even her downtown hot dog cart. This isn’t always a good thing, as she’s had several people attack and threaten her online because they find the videos offensive.
One time she posted a video poking fun at a house that was for sale that also had a teddy bear memorial for someone who was killed in front of it. People who knew the murder victim found the video and sent T Barb messages threatening to kill her.
“It wasn’t about somebody getting killed, it was about the real estate agent posting this house not thinking, who wants to buy this house where somebody was murdered?” she says. “But that’s when I knew I had to watch my back, even though it wasn’t my intent to be disrespectful. I’m not going to take the original one down, but I don’t repost it for that reason.”
She’s also had people trash her, saying that her videos reinforce stereotypes of Black people and spread negativity.
“I’ve done the work,” she says responding to her critics. “I’ve been out here for years keeping Black kids in Black homes. I’ve helped a lot of homeless people get on their feet. So I don’t pay attention to that because you probably ain’t never did nothing for nobody, nowhere. I’m still on the ground doing things for the community.”
You can catch T Barb as part of the “Eyes Up Here” show starting at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 23 at the Independent Comedy Club; 2320 Caniff St., Hamtramck; planetant.com. Tickets are $15-25. More information is available at tbarbisfunny.com.
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