Ali Wong Outdoes Herself With Hard Knock Wife

About half an hour into Ali Wong's new Netflix special Hard Knock Wife, the comedian, extremely pregnant with her second child, spends almost a full minute describing and acting out the sound of her friend queefing. First Wong clutches her face, knocking her red nerd glasses askew and pantomiming the feeling of a great gust of wind drying out her eyeballs. Then she wriggles her arm up and down and side to side like a balloon deflating, twisting her face into a pained squint and blowing a symphony of fart sounds that goes on and on and on and ends with a slow, sad hiss, and a huge round of applause from the audience.

It's a classic Wong bit: irreverent, scatological, physically over-the-top, pitting her appearance—pregnant, petite, feminine, Asian—against her persona: the cranky, horny, filthy-mouthed, rubber-faced, opportunistic gremlin we fell for in 2016's Baby Cobra (her prior Netflix special, which she filmed in the third trimester of her first pregnancy). But there's something new here too: the (hopefully temporary) loss of control over one's bodily functions is a side effect of having given birth (both Wong and her friend are new mothers). And the acting out of this "fat ass queef" is actually the punchline to a very long set up in which the comedian recounts telling her friend that her postpartum vagina resembles a pair of "meat curtains" and "the train of a sad-ass wedding dress"—making the unnamed woman laugh hard enough to expel air from her genitals.

So, to sum this up: Ali Wong tells a joke about once telling joke so funny that she made her friend queef. Kind of a baller move, and not a bad intro to Hard Knock Wife, a stand up set about the horrors of childbirth, but also one about Wong owning—and, because it's her: bemoaning—her talent and success in the aftermath of her wildly popular, career-making special. "A year ago, nobody knew who I was," she says. Now people dress up as her for Halloween.

In many ways Hard Knock Wife recycles the Baby Cobra formula, complete with bulging baby bump as prop. There are call backs to old bits: the humiliation of shitting at work and the joys of shitting at home; the unique character of Wong's nipples; the pains of being an Asian woman driver; the measures married couples take to keep monogamous sex interesting; the irritating way dads are celebrated for extremely minor parenting contributions; the fact that Wong makes more money than her husband, despite her lifelong desire to be a kept woman (she's done as much to unpack—and in certain ways to legitimize—the principles of choice feminism as anyone I can think of). Even when the jokes differ, the beats are the same. Yesterday's radical honesty about miscarrying is today's radical honesty about perineal tears (Wong had a C-section, but one can only assume that's what befell her friend). The comedian even wears the same kind of outfit; another skin tight mini-dress, this time leopard print; another pair of ballet flats, this time shiny and gold. ("When you're a mom, you need sparkle to compensate for the light inside of you that has died.") Throughout it all the main difference is the low, persistent hum of fame, which she treats as just another thing to be grumpy about. "I realized I have no interest in being famous," she confesses. "All I ever wanted was more money for less effort."

Luckily the shtick is just as funny the second time around, no doubt in part because the dearth of moms in the stand-up world is just as stark as it was two years ago. "Female comics don't get pregnant," Wong proclaimed in Baby Cobra. "Once they do get pregnant, they disappear."

Not this one, and that's why Hard Knock Wife makes an even bigger statement than its prequel. If the latter special was the view from the precipice, this is the view from the other side— a touch less original, but all the more triumphant. Shortly after taking the stage, Wong acknowledges the elephant—cobra?—in the room. "I have not been performing that much, at all, in the past two years because two years ago I gave birth to a baby girl."

"I love her soooo much," she adds a few moments later. "But I'm on the verge of putting her in the garbage." Ladies and gentlemen, Ali Wong is back.