It is not unusual for a female comedian to talk about her body. It is a little less conventional for her to talk about what comes out of it. Her breast milk, for instance. “Local, organic, free-range, farm-to-mouth milk,” Ali Wong recently told an audience at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood. “Squirting out of my titties,” she continued, circling her index fingers in front of her breasts. “Squirting out of like fifteen holes in each titty. Like a Bellagio fountain.” Or her mucus. “I’m addicted to picking my nose,” she declared later that night, at a second gig. “In a world of red tape and bureaucracy, where it takes forever to buy a house or get a cell-phone plan going, it’s so instant to just stick your finger up there and go for something your own body produces.” Or her afterbirth: “After the baby comes out, you know what else exits? Her house.”
It is possible that female excretion is relatively untouched comedic terrain because the most noteworthy things that women expel are children—and few female standups have any. Performing in clubs is not a career that fosters an ideal work-life balance. “It’s almost impossible to be on the road as a female comic,” Amy Schumer said, “even without having to keep something other than yourself alive.”
Wong, who is thirty-four, filmed her recent Netflix special, “Baby Cobra,” when she was seven and a half months pregnant. “It’s very rare and unusual to see a female comic perform pregnant,” Wong announced from the stage. “Because female comics . . . don’t get pregnant.” (As with many rules, Joan Rivers presents an exception: in the late sixties, she performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show” while pregnant—though she didn’t mention it in her set.) “Once they do get pregnant, they disappear.”
The opposite has been true for Wong. Not long before she taped “Baby Cobra,” tickets for a show that she headlined—at Cobb’s Comedy Club, in her home town, San Francisco—sold so poorly that the proprietors put a block of them up for sale on Groupon. Recently, the club, which has four hundred seats, sold out five of her shows in minutes. She is juggling a job as a writer on ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat” (the first prime-time series about an Asian-American family on network television since Margaret Cho’s “All-American Girl,” which aired for one season in the nineties) with acting in a new sitcom, also for ABC. Earlier this month, the clothing label Opening Ceremony invited Wong to walk the runway during Fashion Week. She is beloved by mothers, who have started coming up to her on the street. The Web site scarymommy.com announced, “She is your new queen, pregnant ladies.”
“Baby Cobra” is an hour of often extremely filthy material delivered by a tiny, foxy, Vietnamese-Chinese-American wearing a short, tight, black-and-white dress that hugs the balloon of her belly. There is a bracing thrill to watching a woman so manifestly gravid being irreverent and lewd. She describes meeting her husband at a wedding six years earlier like so: “I knew that he was a catch, so I was, like, ‘All right, Ali, you gotta make this dude believe that your body is a secret garden.’ ” She makes a sexy face and thrusts her big belly forward. “When really it’s a public park,” she continues, hand on stomach, “that has hosted many reggae fests, and has even accidentally let . . .” she trails off and counts, “two homeless people inside. I thought they were hipsters.”
Wong’s impending motherhood is “Baby Cobra” ’s most striking element, but it is not the one that has impressed other comics. “Everybody is making a big fucking deal that she was pregnant,” Bill Burr said on his podcast, when what really mattered was that “she was fucking original.” Margaret Cho said, about “Baby Cobra,” “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Schumer told me that she considers Wong “a revolutionary in comedy.”
In many ways, though, the things that Wong describes onstage are unremarkable—the typical concerns of a person in her mid-thirties who grew up “a total private-school Asian.” She is coping with the demands of her career and motherhood. (Her standup now includes a bit about how expensive her nanny is: “My husband and I, we gotta work very hard—to not take care of our child ourselves.”) She used to be promiscuous and wild, but now she’s too tired for sex. She wants her husband, a graduate of Harvard Business School, to be successful. She is concerned about her aging mother. She eats gluten-free.
What is radical about Wong is that her discussion of quotidian domesticity is interwoven with commentary on what may be the last taboo of female sexuality: women are animals. It’s old news that women can be as raunchy and libidinous as men. Wong addresses something else, which has remained virtually unexplored, not just in comedy but in pop culture at large: the terrifically hard-core female experience of reproduction—the part that comes after the sex that so many women have already publicly declared they want. Wong describes nursing, for instance, as a “savage ritual that reminds you that you ain’t nothing but a mammal.”
When aspiring comics ask Wong how she has dealt with being a standup who is Asian or female or a mother, she tells them not to think of these things as obstacles. “You just shift your perspective and think, Wait a minute: I’m a woman!” she told me. “And most standup comics are male. You know what male comics can’t do? They can’t get pregnant. They can’t perform pregnant. So my attitude is, just use all those differences. Don’t think of it as you’re oppressed.” She switched from her normal voice to one of indeterminate ethnic origin—Chinese? Chola?—that she often uses onstage: “You special.”
When Wong is not performing, her speech is slower, and she has none of the coiled intensity she puts into her show. “People are always very surprised by how offstage with my husband I’m a completely different person . . . very soft and nurturing,” Wong says in “Baby Cobra.” She boasts that she has been packing his lunch every day for five years. “I did that so he would become dependent on me,” she continues, “because he graduated from Harvard Business School. And I don’t want to work anymore.”
Wong is her family’s primary breadwinner at the moment. Her husband, Justin Hakuta, who had a mild goatee and was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt when I visited their house in Culver City one evening this summer, is a product manager for Internet companies, but he was between jobs. Neither he nor Wong seemed particularly concerned. “I don’t worry about that, ever,” Wong said. She was sitting on the living-room floor, playing with her daughter, Mari, who was nine months old: intent, curious, peaceful, dressed in a white onesie that Randall Park, the star of “Fresh Off the Boat,” had hand-lettered with the Louis Vuitton monogram. “A lot of people in those product-manager positions fall into a trap of getting into a startup that’s like a nightmare: crazy hours, totally disorganized, toxic environment,” Wong continued. “And I don’t want him doing that.”
Hakuta—who is half Japanese and half Filipino but looks, Wong thinks, “Asian with Aztec undertones”—said that he’d grown up comfortable with the idea of a varied and fluctuating career. His father, Ken, introduced the United States to the sticky, wall-walking toy octopuses that were a hit in the eighties, then became the host of a children’s television program called “The Dr. Fad Show,” and now manages the estate of his uncle, the Fluxus artist Nam June Paik. “Of course,” Wong said, “my mom, she’s always, like, ‘What’s gonna happen? Oh, my God, it’s the end of the world!’ ” In the kitchen, Wong’s mother, Tammy, a retired social worker, and her uncle, Long Nguyen, were making dinner: the two had come to Los Angeles from San Francisco for a visit. Wong said that when she told her mother she was filming a Netflix special Tammy said, “They show ‘Cheers’ reruns on there. So what?”
Wong, who has been performing standup for a dozen years, had been approached several times about recording a special, and had always said that she wasn’t ready. “But I thought that if I did it when I was pregnant then I would always associate the baby with a break if I got it,” she told me. “A couple of female standup comics I know refer to their kids as their Little Career Killers,” she continued. “I was, like, I really do not want to feel that way. It sounds crazy, but if it wasn’t for Mari and doing that special when I was pregnant with her I could see how very easily I would have slowed down, and stopped.”
Wong and Hakuta’s house is a wacky one-story with several outbuildings and lots of mosaic tile, installed by the previous owner, which depicts sailboats, bright flowers, clouds, and happy people with red and yellow hair. “We’re thinking of redoing the hair in black, so they all look Asian,” Wong said. She showed me the low-ceilinged room where she does yoga, and then the shed where Hakuta meditates, the walls hung with paintings of nature scenes. Before the baby, they liked to take ayahuasca and go on silent meditation retreats together. “Sometimes,” Wong says onstage, “all this hippie-dippy shit we do makes me feel like we are white people doing an impression of Asian people.”
Wong’s mother and her uncle Long had set out a meal of bánh tráng: rice noodles, stir-fried shrimp, greens, and rice-paper wrappers that they dipped, one by one, in a half-moon-shaped vessel of water to soften them. Tammy immigrated to the United States from Hue, Vietnam, when she was eighteen, and went to school in Nebraska. “I thought, What is this?” she remembered. “It was like ‘Green Acres.’ ” As she served noodles, she said, “We came from eleven children.”
“That number is always changing,” Wong said, feeding Mari spoonfuls of mashed taro root.
“Well, there were fourteen births all told,” her uncle clarified; several of the siblings died as infants or children. In “Baby Cobra,” Wong talks about having a miscarriage eleven weeks into her first pregnancy: “My mom, she’s from a Third World country, and when I told her I had one she was, like, ‘Uh, yeah, where I’m from that’s like losing a pair of shoes.’ ”
After college, Tammy married Adolphus Wong, a Chinese-American anesthesiologist, and they raised four children in Pacific Heights, a picturesque neighborhood in San Francisco. Ali is the youngest by a decade: her two sisters are stay-at-home moms; her brother is an acupuncturist whom she describes as a “Chinese George Costanza—he’s always got some side hustle going.” I asked Tammy if her youngest daughter had always been funny. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I had four kids. So I was busy.”
In addition to shooting the new sitcom—“American Housewife,” about a stay-at-home mother trying to adjust to life in Westport, Connecticut—and writing for “Fresh Off the Boat” and getting up at five-thirty to breast-feed, Wong goes out most nights, after she and Hakuta put Mari to sleep by singing “Baby Beluga” in unison, to perform at local clubs. She doesn’t announce these gigs to her fans, because, for her purposes, the fewer spectators there are at these shows the better. “If the audience is really shitty, you feel free to just blurt things out,” she told me. “That’s the only way I write: onstage.” She estimated that out of every ten gigs maybe one yields a new nugget that she can use. “I’m always chasing that,” she said.
After the bánh tráng, Wong drove half an hour from her house to Pancho’s, a place in Manhattan Beach that is part Mexican restaurant and part music-and-comedy club. There were about a dozen people in the audience, mostly male, including a table of four very buff guys in tight T-shirts. “You all into gel and kettlebells?” Wong asked them from the stage. She was wearing a brown jumpsuit that she had put on earlier because it was convenient for breast-feeding. “Did you guys all see each other and say, ‘We should hang out, because our arms look the same’?”
They laughed at everything she said, which was striking, because so much of it had to do with things that supposedly make men squeamish. Like giving birth: “They put up this curtain so your husband can only see your human side and not your cadaver side.” And rage. “My husband occasionally changes diapers and people can’t believe it—‘What a doting father!’ ” Wong shouted. “I was doing skin-on-skin contact with my baby girl to bond with her: she shit on my chest. Where’s my trophy at?”
Wong can get away with a considerable amount of vulgarity—and hollering—because she is funny, but it also helps that she uses her differences, as she put it, to destabilize her audience’s expectations. “The archetype that gets projected onto us as Asian women of being silent—she really does go against that,” Margaret Cho told me. Sometimes, when Wong wants to find out if a riff is good, she’ll deliver it in a soft voice, a kind of monotonic stage whisper, because then if people laugh she knows that they are responding to the material and not to her crackling energy. More often, she is almost screaming at the audience—mixing enthusiasm and outrage in a kind of delighted tantrum.
At Pancho’s, Wong began questioning one of the muscular friends, who was Asian, about his romantic life. “I bet white chicks love you,” she said. “You’re like an exotic . . . fish. You’re like a buff bird.” He said he was out looking to meet someone, and asked for her number. “I have a C-section scar, bro!” Wong howled. “I haven’t showered in like a week! If you think that’s hot—and you got money and you know how to commit and you’re good with children—maybe!”
In the car on the way to her next appearance, Wong told me that, in fact, she had not had time to shower in five days, since she stayed overnight at a hotel in Dallas for a gig and was fleetingly free of maternal responsibility. “The telltale giveaway is when I have my hair like this.” It was in two French braids that graduated into pigtails. She looked surprisingly clean. “It’s an art,” she said.
We were in Wong’s new RAV4, her only splurge after her recent success. She was giving her mother her old Toyota Corolla, which, as she said in “Baby Cobra,” has a “huge bear-claw scratch on the side from this aggressive brick wall that came out of nowhere.” According to Wong’s routine, there are two stereotypes of Asian women that are fair: they live forever, and they drive poorly—“You know why we’re such bad drivers? Because we’re trying to die.” As we hurtled down the freeway, Wong came very close to smashing her new car when she changed lanes. “Hoo-wee!” she shrieked. “Hoo-wee.”
Doing multiple shows every night is Wong’s long-standing habit: between 2009 and 2011, when she lived in New York City, she did as many as nine a night. Nahnatchka Khan, the showrunner of “Fresh Off the Boat,” told me, “I don’t think that she considers performing working, necessarily—it’s so much a part of her. Like, I can’t imagine a world where Ali is not performing.”
Wong’s standup career began when she moved back home to San Francisco in 2005, after majoring in Asian-American studies at U.C.L.A., and then completing a Fulbright program studying language in Vietnam. In college, she was in a comedy-and-theatre group that Randall Park had co-founded. After she graduated, standup seemed like the simplest way to get back onstage. “You don’t need much,” Wong said. “You do whatever you want—you don’t depend on anybody else. So I started going to open mics when I was twenty-three and living with my parents. I’ve been doing it pretty much every night, or every other night, ever since.” Park, who had also started doing standup, stayed on Wong’s couch when he performed in San Francisco. “Before I knew it—like half a year into dedicating herself to standup—she had a following,” he told me.
Wong said that her parents used to go see her sets, and that they were proud of her ambition. She describes her father as “highly non-stereotypical”—open-minded and quirky. “He was born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown,” Wong told me. “Poor. Like fishing-vegetables-out-of-a-garbage-can-with-his-mom poor. Like no-running-water-in-his-apartment poor. And they invested everything in my dad. I can’t believe he didn’t cave under all that pressure, and just did what he was supposed to do and became a doctor.” When he came home from the emergency room, he told Wong about everything he saw; after a man came in one night with, “like, fifty Barbie heads in his butt,” she remembered, her father drew her a diagram that showed the path of the doll parts through his large intestine. Adolphus died in 2011, after battling cancer. “He had an attraction toward the arts. But, because of his duty, he couldn’t,” Wong said. “My sister has this painting of his—it’s, like, this great painting, by anybody’s standards. I really love that painting.”
During the decade that Wong was focussed on standup, Randall Park’s acting career took off: he played Kim Jong-un in “The Interview,” and appeared in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and in “The Office,” as a character called Asian Jim Halpert. Then he landed the lead in “Fresh Off the Boat” and recommended Wong for a job, even though she had no experience writing for sitcoms. “There was all this speculation and paranoia that it wasn’t going to be good,” Wong told me. “I think people think that Asian-Americans are really good at hive-mentality stuff—you know, like, in entertainment maybe they’re good at ‘America’s Best Dance Crew’ dancing, or, like, tennis—but not at being truly innovative and having something to say that will create a cultural Zeitgeist. What hurts is when I feel like Asian people believe that about ourselves.”
For Park, part of Wong’s appeal was the specificity of her voice. “For a lot of Asian-American—a lot of minority—comedians, myself included, the crutch when you first start out is to do hacky ethnic jokes,” he said. “It’s in a lot of ways an easier laugh. She never really relied on that.” Wong uses her ethnicity in her comedy—“I have some useful advice for all of my Asian-American brothers and sisters: never go paintballing with a Vietnam veteran”—but not more than her sexuality or her eating habits or her finances. “A lesson that I keep learning from her is: do you,” Park continued. “Her voice is just so . . . it’s Ali. If it’s happened to her and if it’s affected her, it’s going to come out.”
One of the characters that she writes for “Fresh Off the Boat” bursts into nosebleeds whenever he gets worked up. “I really do have chronic bloody noses,” Wong told me. “This is disgusting, but it gets triggered either by me picking my nose or by me getting really excited.” During the shooting of the first episode that Wong wrote, Nahnatchka Khan came on set and called out a greeting. “I turned to her, and I had tissues in my nose with blood streaming in them,” Wong told me. “And I was like, ‘I’m just so excited!’ ”
Wong did not tell her family when she was hired on “Fresh Off the Boat.” “They found out because I had a framed picture of me and Justin at the finale party dressed up, and then there was a little ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ icon in the corner,” she said. She still hasn’t told them about “American Housewife.” Before “Baby Cobra,” Wong explained, she had been in at least six pilots, as well as a medical-procedural drama with Vanessa Redgrave and a sitcom with Laura Prepon, and none of them amounted to much. “My mom doesn’t understand that I have no control if a project dies,” Wong said. “She’ll be, like, ‘Why didn’t you say something about the writing not being good?’ Or, ‘Why didn’t you tell the main actress to be more funny?’ And then it makes me super upset. And then it’s bad for our relationship.”
She would tell her mother about the new show only once it had aired. “I mean, it’s absurd,” Wong continued. “If Mari didn’t tell me what she was working on, it would drive me crazy.” She sighed. “If I didn’t have to make money, I would be happy just staying home with her all day and doing these shows at night.” When she arrives at clubs with time to kill before her set, she watches videos of the baby, and sometimes it makes her ache to go home.
For the average fan, it is probably less surprising to hear a hugely pregnant woman describe herself as a “pervert—a gross, filthy animal,” as Wong does in “Baby Cobra,” than to hear any successful woman admit, “I don’t want to lean in: I want to lie down.” Wong says in her routine that she “trapped” her husband for his earning potential, and declares, “Feminism is the worst thing to ever happen to women: our job used to be...no job.”
She was kidding about feminism. “I think people who don’t get that are, like, not so smart,” she said. “It’s a comedy show, not a TED talk.” But she was serious about wanting to work less. “I really just want more money for less effort,” she told me. “Don’t you want that, too?”
The problem, though, is that Wong also wants to make a romantic comedy that she and Randall Park have been talking about for years—“our version of ‘When Harry Met Sally.’ ” And she is already planning a follow-up special to “Baby Cobra,” trying to improve things that she could have done better. In the car one night, on the way from one show to another, she reworked the joke about trying to convince her husband that her body was a secret garden: “What I should have said somewhere in there is ‘When a woman sleeps with a man right away, it’s not because we don’t respect ourselves—it’s because we don’t respect you.’ ”
Wong’s gig was at the Lab at the Hollywood Improv: a small room with burgundy walls, decorated with rainbow Christmas lights. She was wearing her brown jumpsuit again, and a small backpack that she kept on as she got onstage. She did her usual C-section and Bellagio-fountain material, but then she brought in something new. As her father reached the end of his life, she said, he “just didn’t give a shit anymore.” She had been talking in the car about his painting, and he seemed resurrected in her mind. “He couldn’t hold his bladder very well,” she continued. “And when T-Mobile would tell him, ‘Sir, we don’t have a bathroom for customers,’ he would pull a jar out of his backpack and go, ‘You do now.’ ” He would hide the container under his coat and then discreetly urinate, “like a pee ninja!”
Earlier that evening, one of the comics sharing the bill with Wong had done a bit about receiving a “blowie” from a woman named Bambi. Another had talked about how he’d like to receive a “ho fax” on each prospective sexual partner. Wong’s jokes about sex had a decidedly different tone. She started by talking about how little of it she wanted since she gave birth. “I cannot be bothered to put a towel on the bed afterward to absorb that post-sex wet spot—you know that perfectly round-ass wet spot on the bed that gets all cold in wintertime? It’s like an ice-fishing hole, because it smells like penguins.” The crowd was loosening up, getting more pliant; people moved their bodies more as they laughed. “The faster we let a fresh new penis inside us, the less we think of the person attached to it as marriage material,” Wong said, and then assumed the pose she often takes onstage after she drops an insight: lips flexed forward, eyebrows up, one arm slung over the mic stand, her body language announcing, This is how it is. “If a woman sleeps with a man on the first date, it doesn’t mean we don’t respect ourselves.” There were some encouraging hoots from the audience. “It means we don’t respect . . . you.”
The reaction was intense: there was clapping, there was laughing, and there was a certain amount of yelling. As Wong took in the response, I noticed a darkening by her nostrils. “Shit—I just got really excited,” she said, and clamped her fingers on her nose to stem the bleeding. Then she pulled a pack of Kleenex from her bag and stuffed a little plug of tissue up each nostril and kept on going. ♦
