Ali Wong is Unlikeable in New "Don Wong" Netflix Special
The comedian's latest stand up is filled with crude fantasies about cheating on her husband, who she has since divorced
Ali Wong has certainly never been a comedian you could consider wholesome. Listed as âraunchyâ in the comedy category on Netflix, Wongâs previous specials Baby Cobra (2016) and Hard Knock Wife (2018) were blunt and full of explicitness that made you cringe or mutter âthatâs messed up!â throughout viewing. However, she did seem to be moving on a from a past of hooking up with random homeless guys in her native San Francisco to entering marriage and family life. She famously filmed both specials while pregnant, and while her crass sense of humor made you wince, she was redeemed by the fact that she was a wife and a mother.
One reason I liked Wong was her bluntness about the pressures of modern feminism in Baby Cobra. She blurts out, âI donât want to lean in. I want to lie downâ and loudly exclaims âI think feminism is the worst thing that ever happened to women! Now weâre expected to work!â My friends and I, exhausted by the lies of feminism in our mid 20s, were in stitches. You never hear that feminism is bad for women on a woke and mainstream platform like Netflix! A woman publicly rejecting feminism while married and pregnant was shocking in the best way.
Wong was funny and frank about her journey to wife and mom. But in Don Wong, her newfound fame has clearly gone to her head, and sheâs now indulging temptations to break apart her family. It makes for a lot less laughs and a lot more cringing.
Released on Valentineâs Day 2022, Wong begins with a lot of egotism about her new riches and fame. Itâs all very self-congratulatory, and she immediately sets herself apart from the rest of us plebs. She then bemoans that it is hard for a woman with her level of celebrity to find a man above her, and in more vulgar terms, says a man of lower status should be honored to be with high-powered career women like herself. It certainly isnât untrue that the pool of prospects for women with successful careers gets smaller, but what does Wong care about this if she is already married?
Well, then she tells us - in explicit detail - how much she wants to cheat on her husband. Suddenly her resentment makes sense! She has a very strong wandering eye. After a particularly crass bit in which she describes how she wants to sleep with the entire cast of The Avengers, she laughs âI think Iâm having a mid-life crisis.â
You want to be on her side, but you canât because she is so gross throughout the entire special. Yeah, sheâs always been gross, but this is a different level of disgusting than her usual bathroom humor. She wants to cheat on her husband while married with two young children? Itâs downright difficult to listen to. I skipped ahead several times to spare myself the poison. At one point I said to my sister, âI feel like Iâm listening to a demon right now.â Itâs an hour of Wong yearning for hook ups and hedonism, and it makes the listener feel uneasy.
What made Wong likable in the first place was that she was oriented towards the good. Yeah, she was crass, but her jokes were situated on top of something you could respect. She tries to get the audience back on her side at the end by listing all the great qualities about her husband, but itâs too late to believe her by then. We just listened to her yearn for carnal self-indulgence and infidelity for the past hour. Just 2 months after the special was released, news broke that Wong divorced her husband.
When I googled her new special, I couldnât find any negative reviews - just a lot of scolding of anyone who didnât find her âempowering.â The media predictably wrote woke pro-sexual-liberation takes. NBC News called the descriptions of her explicit sexual fantasies âprofound,â because she is Asian American (what?). Esquire said asking about how husband feels about her work is âa dated question,â as if it isnât perfectly normal for a viewer to wonder how a husband might feel about his wife talking about how much she wants to cheat on him. So, weâre not allowed to raise our eyebrows at her material or wonder if something is genuinely wrong in her marriage, even though clearly it was. Instead weâre supposed to cheer her infidelity on, and call her âempoweredâ and âgroundbreaking.â
Itâs rough to watch Wong struggle with her new success. Itâs rough to hear her talk about how much she wants to sleep around behind her husbandâs back. And itâs rough to watch the mainstream media cheer it all on.
You want to like Wong, but sheâs just not doing the right thing here. Instead of making us like her more, I just felt sorry for her husband and kids. Wongâs strength was always in her willingness to say what no one else would say, which made her relatable. But maybe some things are better left unsaid.