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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