"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, October 25, 2019

Ali Wong: Baby Cobra (2016)


No News Satire Roundup this week, so I’m sticking with my usual habit of watching and reviewing a standup special in the interim. And as so often seems to happen with my standup-watching, it’s a special that I heard about and that piqued my interest long before I got around to watching it. Still, better late than never, so here’s Baby Cobra!

Although I’ve seen Always Be My Maybe and have seen/read interviews with Ali Wong here and there, this was my first time actually seeing her in standup mode. Her style is interesting. It’s kind of meandering but almost deceptively so. She moves so fluidly from one bit to the next that it can take you a minute to realize she’s changed the subject. But at the same time, certain lines and phrases anchor the entire special, reoccurring periodically and tying a new bit neatly to a seemingly-unrelated one that she did 20 minutes ago.

It’s also, as advertised, very vulgar. For me, the only bit that gets really uncomfortable is a sequence where she’s talking about “helping men ‘discover’ their prostate” (despite their initial protestations.) But other than that, there are a ton of great jokes in the dirty stuff – she doesn’t use vulgarity as a way to cover up a lack of actual comedic thought. She has a fun bit about how “women who are in charge” like it rough in the bedroom, I love the whole thing about the trials and tribulations of pooping in an office bathroom, and I get a kick out of her description of how powerful it makes her feel when white guys go down on her. Also, there’s a great bit toward the beginning about HPV; I love the line, “HPV is like a ghost that lives in a man’s body and says, ‘Boo!’ in a woman’s.”

At the filming of this special, Wong was famously 7-and-a-half months pregnant, so she spends a good amount of time discussing that: the process of “trying” with her husband, the female comic friends who tried to discourage her, her deep-seated jealousy of housewives (in no small part because they don’t have to poop in office bathrooms,) and her fears about childbirth. I especially like her comments here about double standards, both in comedy – a male comic becomes a relatable “funny family-man” after having a kid, while she can’t think of any other female comics who’ve performed while pregnant – and in parenting – her husband is lauded for going to every doctor’s appointment with her, even though she also goes to every one.

There are some great bits in here about race and culture too, from schooling her husband on what an “authentic” Vietnamese restaurant looks like, to trying to teach her refugee mother about decluttering. I love the whole thing about how her and her husband’s “hippie” habits (including eating gluten-free “lesbian bread that contains 1000% of your daily fiber content and like 20% spoken-word poetry”) sometimes make her feel like they’re white people who act Asian, complete with Chinese scrolls on their wall that neither of them can read. Love it!

Warnings

Tons of sexual references, language (including the C-word,) drug references, mild references to violence, gross-out humor, and thematic elements.

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