Comedian Ali Wong is quickly becoming a cultural icon. She's gained fame as a stand-up, a sitcom
writer, and a movie and TV star. But just who is this daring funny lady? Keep watching to find out!
Wong has been involved with comedy ever since her college days. She fell in love
with the craft after getting involved with a theater group.
Then she got a scholarship to study in Vietnam. As she told Health Magazine,
"It was great, but I found that [culturally] they didn't have a sense of sarcasm,
and I missed that. When I returned, I was determined to have a career in comedy."
Performing stand-up was a fast way to do that for her,
so she began going to open mics when she was 22.
Her early material was admittedly "disgusting." As she described it to Health Magazine,
"I had moved back from Vietnam and was single, living in San Francisco,
and so horny [...] I would just go out with these guys and then talk about them onstage
the next day. I would talk about their erectile dysfunction and stuff like that.
If you can imagine, it was even dirtier than my [material] is now."
As an Asian American woman in comedy,
Wong has faced a lot of pushback. As she described it to The Guardian in 2019,
"All of these people in the industry kept on telling me: 'You're likable and you're cute,
or whatever, but the jokes are really dirty and you'd get booked a lot more, and you'd be
a lot more appealing if they were clean. Maybe people were half-laughing, half-cringing at my
jokes. But if you're successful, people should be too busy laughing to cringe."
"I was, like, really obsessed with butthole jokes. Still am!"
Despite those comments, Wong has continued to make dirty jokes, although she still
faces criticism from men for talking about experiences like childbirth and breastfeeding.
Quite frankly, she's tired of being defined by her race and her gender. She told Elle in 2019,
"Something I always get asked is: 'What is it like being an Asian American woman in Hollywood?'
I hate this question almost as much as I hate, 'What is it like being a female in comedy?'
Nobody wants his or her identity and defining characteristics reduced to just race and gender,
and I resent that white men never get asked, 'What is it like being a white man in movies?'"
While Wong discovered her passion for comedy at a pretty young age,
it wasn't the first career path she had in mind for herself. In fact,
she initially planned to pursue a career in academia and seemed to be on that path
when she was going to college at UCLA. As she revealed to The Cut in 2017,
"I was an Asian-American studies major in college. For a long time, I thought I would go into
academia and become an Asian-American professor, and then I fell in love with stand-up comedy."
Wong eventually abandoned that scholarly idea,
but she's still managed to put her education to good use in her act.
"Colonize the colonizer!"
As she explained,
"I never set out to specifically speak about representation though — it's so
hard to even just make a joke. I do whatever is first and foremost funny and interesting.
Sometimes that happens to concern Asian-American identity, but not
a lot of it. But it is something I will always be interested in."
Wong has never been afraid to get brutally honest in her comedy routine,
and her no-holds-barred style is often quite personal. But she's careful not
to say anything that might actually damage her marriage. As she revealed to Health Magazine,
"I'll let my husband veto stuff. It's not so much about subject choice; it's about word choice.
So no topic is off-limits — it just depends on if I can make it funny. I would love to talk about
politics, but I've never been able to craft my thoughts into jokes rather than just share anger."
Wong's marriage is more important to her than her career,
and that's why she lets her husband Justin have so much input. As she explained to The Guardian,
"A hilarious joke that performs well in front of strangers but that my husband hates is not
worth getting divorced over. My marriage is much more valuable than a great joke."
Wong makes having a successful comedy career while raising a family look easy,
but she wants people to know that it's anything but. She makes no secret of
the fact that she gets a lot of help to manage everything that's on her plate.
She's also talked about how her girlfriends keep her grounded. As she told Health Magazine,
"They are real people who are working 60-hour weeks — they are public defenders,
doctors, graphic designers. You get the picture. They work their asses off.
So I want to be honest about how I am able to do everything I do."
Wong also keeps her personal and professional lives balanced by
bringing her husband and kids along with her when she's on tour. It can be hectic,
but she sure seems to enjoy it. As she described it to Rolling Stone in 2019,
"There's a lot of activity. Leaving our Airbnb this morning, it was a whole rush.
We had to strip the beds and take out the garbage [...] because I didn't want to get a bad review!"
She continued,
"And then we got a late start on the road because my mom wanted to go to this really
yummy Vietnamese enclave in San Diego, so we went and picked up all these egg rolls [...] Our whole
minivan smelled like wonderful grease and pork. So, yeah, there's a lot happening."
"Touring is not glamorous."
Family is obviously very important to Ali Wong. Her mother is a Vietnamese immigrant, while her
father was the son of a Chinese immigrant. As she recounted to NPR in a 2019 interview,
"I grew up just in a very interesting family that was very interested in
art [...] They would take me constantly to the Asian American Film Festival.
Every time there was a new Wong Kar-wai film, they would take me to see it. And it, you know,
made a huge difference in my confidence because, you know, now there's all this conversation about
how representation matters, and people talk about how they never saw themselves on screen."
In a 2019 interview with Time,
Wong discussed the impact her parents had on her own parenting style as she noted,
"I came from this really atypical Asian-American family. My parents
were not focused on academics. If I got a bad grade, they weren't that upset. In terms of sex,
my parents were always really open. So I'll probably do the same thing."
In 2019, Wong published her book Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets and Advice for
Living Your Best Life, which was inspired by her late father. She explained to NPR,
"There were a lot of knocks on my door to write a book, and I didn't have an idea
really until I thought about writing letters to my daughters. That's very much inspired by
a letter that my father wrote to me before he passed away that began with dear Alexandra."
She continued,
"And it's one of the few things that if my house was on fire, if there was an apocalypse,
I would take with me, along with, you know, my passport and my kids. I just wish that he had
written a lot more because I have so many more questions for him that it's too late to ask."
"It was a short letter, and I love it so much." "Wow." "But I wish that he had written me more."
Wong's husband also played an instrumental part in the book,
providing the afterword in the form of another letter. As Wong told Time,
"I thought it would be nice because he never gets to say anything. He never
gets to clap back at me. I asked him, and he was game right away. I joke about him a lot,
but he’s obviously a very important contributor to everything that I have now."
While Ali Wong and her husband have a strong relationship, that doesn't mean it's without
its struggles. Just like everything else in her life, its success is the result of hard work.
She's been open about how going to therapy has strengthened their relationship, and she believes
all couples could benefit from speaking to a mental health professional. As she told Time,
"I live in Los Angeles where everyone is in some kind of therapy.
You know how online dating used to be all taboo and shameful? Now tons
of people have met online. And now I feel like everyone's in therapy."
She added,
"I don't see how for us we could not go to couples therapy within the first two,
three years of having kids. For us it's been really important,
and for other people, if you don't go to couples therapy I hope you have great
communication skills. You never know what's going on in other people's relationships."
Wong's comedy doesn't shy away from controversial topics, such as miscarriage,
a topic that many people still consider taboo. But for her,
very few things are off limits. Talking about her miscarriage and connecting with others who have
experienced the same kind of loss has helped her get through it. As she told The Guardian,
"It's one thing to hear the statistics but it's another to put faces to the numbers
so you stop feeling like it's your fault. I think that's one of the reasons
women don't tell people when they've had a miscarriage — they think it's their fault."
"Don't feel bad, okay? They were the size of poppy seeds.
I've picked boogers larger than the twins that I lost."
Wong also told The Guardian,
"I remember I worried what my in-laws would think, which is so crazy.
I thought they'd think their son had married a terrible person. Also, because I made the mistake
of telling people as soon as I got pregnant, I then had to tell them the bad news and then
I felt like I was burdening them. So being able to joke about it was such a relief."
Wong's career has blossomed beyond just doing stand-up,
as she's had plenty of opportunities in the past several years to flex her acting skills.
Her most high-profile credits include a regular gig on the ABC sitcom American Housewife and a
leading role in the Netflix film Always Be My Maybe, which she also co-wrote. The movie has
been hailed as one of the best rom-coms of the 2010s, and it was considered a win for Asian
American representation as it included two Asian American leads, which is still rare for the genre.
Always Be My Maybe also pushed back against stereotypes, such as the trope of the overbearing
Asian parent. Instead, the male lead's father is notably laid-back. As Wong explained to Glamour,
"You haven't seen that kind of Asian dad before. My dad was born in the United States.
He didn't have any accent, he was very progressive, and he journaled.
He's really into self-reflection. I know a lot of dads like that,
and I have always felt like it's a shame that they weren't on camera."
She added,
"This is not the Asian American rom-com. This is an Asian American rom com.
That's an Asian American dad. That's an Asian American guy I haven't seen before.
And that's very exciting to me."
Some celebs like the glitz and glamour that comes with being in the public eye, but Ali Wong much
prefers wearing comfortable clothes to getting all dressed up. As she told The Cut in 2017,
"I have to wear things that are comfortable and not too formfitting. If I'm suffocating and
experiencing any sort of pressure in an outfit, it shows on my face and that is not cute. What's
the use of wearing a sexy, tight-ass dress and stilettos if your expression reads 'hostage'?"
Wong initially had a difficult time deciding how to dress while
doing her stand-up routine. She told The Cut,
"When I got on stage, I felt like people were so distracted that I was a woman, and I tried to
strip that away. Then I got tired of that whole style and realized that as long as I was funny,
it didn’t really matter. So as I got better at stand-up and grew up in my 20s,
I let my hair down, literally and figuratively, and it felt great."
Clearly, Ali Wong knows who she is, and that's helped make her the star she is today.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more List videos about your favorite celebs are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.