What a difference two years makes in the life of comedian Ali Wong. Since her previous special, 2022’s Don Wong, Ali has gotten a divorce, and won the Emmy and Golden Globe for her blisteringly hot performance in the Netflix limited series, Beef. She mentions those life-changing events, to be sure, but what Wong really wants to talk about right now is how her fame and status as a fresh divorcee have resulted in an even hornier-than-expected couple of years.
ALI WONG: SINGLE LADY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Filmed at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, CA as part of this spring’s Netflix Is A Joke Fest, Wong directed herself for her fourth Netflix special. In stark contrast to her first two specials, Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife, where a visibly pregnant Wong joked about motherhood and sex, or Don Wong, where she joked about her supposedly “healthy marriage,” this time around she’s just got a lot of “divorced-mom energy” and a desire to simply “get dicked down.” How’s that working out for her so far? Splendidly!
Or as Wong concedes:, “look how much fun I’m having.”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Wong exudes a sincerely raunchy frankness about her sexual desires that she shares with a comedian such as Nikki Glaser, along with the forthright discussions about how both her race and gender play into her personal and professional lives, which was a path laid out before her by the likes of Margaret Cho.
Memorable Jokes: Wong clearly relished her newfound freedom to date and play the field after her divorce, jokingly comparing her “divorced-mom energy” to someone who had just been released from prison after 10 years. Making her instead “a divorced mom who just wants to get dicked down.” Which she then juxtaposed with the younger version of herself, who had joked in her Netflix debut about hoping to trap or a catch a husband through her horniness. Now? “i’m trying to catch a concussion. I’m trying to drink cranberry juice on the regular.”
And she’s willing to pay to play, too. Wong cops to plopping down $250 almost immediately on a year’s subscription to a dating app, and crows that even though she’s rich and famous, she expected the men she dated to pay for the first date. “The money will come back to you,” she promised her suitors, adding that “if you have faith in your product,” then she might just pay to put you up in your own two-bedroom condo in the suburbs.
Once she has established the parameters of hew new lifestyle, Wong can then spend the rest of the hour regaling us with stories about the men she dated through the app. Many of the men after her husband wouldn’t last more than a few weeks, she said, because they’d either get too real with their emotions or too lazy with their courtship.
Sometimes both. Like the movie director who, upon Wong breaking up with him, claimed they merely had communication issues, leading her into an involved act-out mocking him for it on the spot, and then gleefully providing us with a re-enactment of the act-out after revealing how she had, in fact, riffed her reactions to that man in real-time. “I came up with that joke while breaking up with that director in real time. Out loud. In front of his face,” she tells us. “We turned that into lemonade real fast, you know?”
There was the 55-year-old former pro surfer who reminded her of King Triton from The Little Mermaid. The young guy who was dumb and broke but the sex was so great she was jetting around the country for hook-ups with him. And the six-foot-eight drummer she thought she’d fallen love with, only to find that their break-up would make her fall back in love with stand-up.
Our Take: The one suitor you might’ve expected to hear about is the only one Wong doesn’t go into too much detail about at all, except for some foreshadowing.
Comedy fans already know Wong and Bill Hader have been dating for a while (even before she filmed this hour in May), but he remains unnamed in the hour. All she’ll say here is that “some of you might know who the guy is,” and letting us know that he had wooed her with beautiful bouquets of flowers awaiting her on the road in Europe immediately after disclosing his crush on her. But Wong didn’t let Hader’s disclosure stop her from dating all of those other men first.
She even makes fun of him for it, in a way. Wong has long enjoyed exploring the power dynamics between men and women offstage and on, and here she observes how, even without naming Hader, her guy friends and girl friends had wildly opposite reactions to his courtship of her. The women thought his gestures were the sweetest thing ever. The guys? They thought “that dude sounds like a psychopath,”
Then again, as Wong has done in previous specials, she lets us in on just how sordid her guy friends or colleagues in comedy are, here describing the kinds of women they date as dim “Insta-hoes who prey on my friends” and bore her to death.
Even if you’d hoped to hear more about Wong and Hader, the run-up to their relationship is plenty entertaining, too, perhaps because all of her other potential suitors remain unnamed as well, allowing our imaginations to fill in the details on who these guys are.
This hour is all about Wong’s glow-up, both personally and professionally, anyhow.
“i’ve never been pursued this much in my life. It’s very very exciting and quite shocking, because boys never liked me growing up,” she says early in the hour. “They weren’t into charismatic A cups. but things have changed.”
She’s still the same loud, petite Asian-American comedian she was when she arrived in Hollywood, but now that she’s an award-winning actress, she can play the game the way she wants to play it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. “Look how much fun I’m having,” Wong says at one point. We can tell. And her joy at finding love again, or even at just rediscovering dating now that she has some newfound power in the dynamic, makes it fun for us to go along for the ride with her.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ali Wong: Single Lady’ On Netflix, Where The Comedian Dishes On Her Sex Life Post-Divorce, Pre-Hader appeared first on Decider.
