Taryn Delanie Smith on Denise, TikTok fame, and making space for joy

Taryn Delanie Smith is held together with threads of light.

As we stroll to grab coffee on a remarkably perfect September morning in New York, the 29-year-old comedian walks with an ease of confidence that seems to invite joy from strangers.

She beams with genuine glee when she’s approached by a fan on the street and asks them to take a photo together. She taps New Zealand creator Julian Sewell — better known as Paloma Diamond on TikTok — on the shoulder when we walk past one another on 26th Street to effusively tell him she loves his work. (“Oh my God. I love you. You’re amazing,” she says, before turning to me wide-eyed, “Oh, oh my God. That was Paloma Diamond!”) She tears up when she talks about her mom, her best friend, or the ways women are conditioned to be quiet and small.

Always on the cusp of overflowing — into tears, into laughter, into hugging a stranger, into wrestling with the weight of the patriarchy — she feels, at any moment, ready to burst.

Taryn Delanie Smith
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Taryn Delanie Smith / Kristina Saha

Taryn Delanie Smith, Kristina Saha
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Taryn Delanie Smith / Kristina Saha

“A lot of my joy comes from the fact that I cry a lot,” she tells me as we walk towards Fishs Eddy, a homegoods store known for its kitschy dinnerware, to search for something for her new house an hour and a half north of the city. “Sometimes, I think I’m loosely sewn together. I feel like there are so many big emotions in me all the time.”

All of this vulnerability might make it seem like she’s ill-suited for a life on social media, a place infamous for its casual cruelty. But she offsets it with a fair amount of humor, empathy, and a layer of exceptionally tough skin. She’s used these attributes to build an audience of more than 1.1 million followers on Instagram and 1.6 million followers on TikTok, where she shares comedy videos, skits, DIY projects in her new home, and occasional glimpses of her life with her husband, friends, and Great Dane, Bruce. She also co-hosts the podcast We’re Your Girls with her best friend Tiffani Singleton. 

Still, she’s likely most well-known today for playing Denise, a gum-chewing, bathrobe-wearing receptionist in heaven with a thick New York accent and her hair in a towel. Alongside Denise, she brings to life Tammy — a vengeful ghost who somehow resides in heaven — and a rotating cast of characters who pass through the pearly gates.

From Princess Diana to Whitney Houston to viewers’ own departed loved ones, Denise ends up greeting us all. As NPR wrote in 2023 about her series, “What she does so intuitively well is pair grief with a dose of playfulness, and also with secularity and spirituality, authenticity and vulnerability, the personal and the universal — all combining into a potent catharsis cocktail.”

It’s that mix of empathy and humor that makes those videos so fun to watch. She’s willing to talk about almost anything, as long as she senses genuine openness on the other side. When she doesn’t, her guard goes up.

She, of course, is affected by the negativity that’s bound to arise being an online figure, but she sees her main responsibility as cultivating a safe space — for queer people, for people of color, for people grieving, for people looking for a moment of joy. At the same time, she still tries to meet commenters who disagree with her halfway. It’s a constant balancing act.

“I don’t respond to the comments that are vitriol, that are just evil,” she says. “I don’t respond to that because you’re not coming to the table wanting to talk to me. But if they’re like, ‘I want what you want for our community. I just disagree with how to get there.’ I’m not interested in exiling you from the community, because then how will we learn from each other? How do we have dialogue? How do we get to where we want to go? The only way out is not through, but together.”

That perspective has led her to such resounding success. In a white dress and heels, with makeup and hair styled to perfection by her best friend and collaborator, Singleton (“my greatest muse”), Delanie Smith radiates a magnetic charm. It’s easy to see why over a million people are so drawn to her. 

Taryn Delanie Smith
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Taryn Delanie Smith

She grew up in West Seattle (“Oh, we love an orca!”) as the youngest of four with three older brothers. At school, she was often teased and bullied by boys, but she found solace among the girls. She said she “always loved the girls” and understood where they came from, even if they got prickly.

“I know how it feels to have so many big emotions, and we live in a society that is constantly tamping women down and telling us to feel less, and be quieter, and if we do feel anything at all, we’re hysterical. That would just about make anybody a little bit depressed,” she says. The girls were reacting to a patriarchal world with whatever tools they had at hand; “the boys’ cruelty always felt malicious.”

When she started competing in beauty pageants, she felt an unexpected need to scream. Not in horror, but in a desire to take up space. “That was sort of the beginning of this bubbling up within me,” she says. 

But beauty pageants are also a world built on rejection, one that mirrors the industry she works in today. As a comedian, she auditions for shows all the time without getting chosen for the job. So she’s familiar with the feeling.

“Starting at 17, I was losing, super publicly in front of people, to my friends. You’re competing in a beauty pageant with your homies,” she says. “I got really used to, at a young age, having to clap and swallow your own disappointment of like, ‘I wanted it, too. I’m not afraid to admit it. But I am really happy for my friends.'”

Of course, it was only a matter of time before she won a pretty huge title.

Taryn Delanie Smith
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Taryn Delanie Smith

After moving to New York City to pursue a degree and become a diplomat, she found herself in a receptionist job she hated and was applying for government work when she posted her first TikTok, a short montage of her life in New York City that didn’t really pick up any traction.

However, her second TikTok — a funny video about living in her kind of shitty Upper East Side apartment — went viral, accumulating millions of views within the first 24 hours.

Within the month, she quit her day job to pursue something she said she has always loved: making people laugh. For her, comedy isn’t just joy; it “feels like a form of resistance sometimes to how I’m supposed to be as a woman — to be loud, to be weird.” 

“It’s the only reason that I got to be this loud,” she joked. “I like making people feel good. I like making people laugh. Sometimes comedy is the only way to talk about something really hard. And I like talking about the hard stuff. I do. Comedy is a really safe way to do it. It’s a really exciting way to explore the whole human existence and all those bad emotions and grief, too. I like it, and I spread it like a little disease.”

Later that year, she made history as the first Black Miss New York to compete with her natural hair, finishing as first runner-up for Miss America in 2023. Her advocacy work in the role focused on homelessness, and she’s currently a board member at Trinity Place Shelter, a non-sectarian transitional shelter for LGBTQ youth.

At the center of it all, Delanie Smith seems intimately concerned about her ability to Do Good. She picks up the trash on the counter at the coffee shop we go to. She tells a stranger she is “so stunning.” She buys a dachshund dish for Singleton at Fishs Eddy and surprises me with a pin. She has a difficult time focusing during our conversation until a man who is visibly distressed receives help.

She introduces herself to, and knows the name of, everyone she meets when we’re together — the Mashable receptionist, the video team, the photographers, the doormen. She smiles and waves at fans with seeming genuine delight. And when she’s writing comedy, she says, “the kid with the roller backpack is very much in the room.” 

Taryn Delanie Smith
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Taryn Delanie Smith

These days, she splits her time between writing skits as Denise or Tammy, working on her podcast with Singleton, making videos about fixing up a 234-year-old manor in Hudson Valley, and, as she puts it, being “a silly goose.” In her new home, Bruce roams gleefully in the fields, and she hopes to add chickens and donkeys to the mix. 

“Sometimes, [I] lay in bed at night as somebody who thought I was gonna change the world in the human rights space — I just didn’t end up doing that,” she tells me on a bench in Washington Square Park. “So you think, ‘God, is what I’m doing silly? Is all this so silly? Am I silly?’ And then I’m like, ‘Maybe that’s the whole point.’ We have our own gifts, and if you find a way to use yours — even if it’s silly or random or weird — to make your corner of the world better, well then, you probably did a good job.”