Creator / Ali Wong

"To be a Trophy Wife, you have to be a trophy. I am more of a commemorative plaque."

— "Hard Knock Wife"

Alexandra "Ali" Wong (born April 19, 1982 in San Francisco, California) is an American comedian, writer, and actress of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. She started out appearing in high-profile comedy shows before becoming a regular on Chelsea Handler's Are You There, Chelsea?. She has had both minor and major roles in film and television since, including Black Box, American Housewife, and Tuca & Bertie. In 2019 she wrote and starred in Always Be My Maybe alongside her friend and colleague Randall Park.

Wong has also written for Fresh Off the Boat. She has three stand-up specials on Netflix: Baby Cobra, Hard Knock Wife, and Don Wong, and has appeared As Herself on Bill Nye Saves the World and Ugly Delicious.

Common themes in her comedy include sex jokes and Toilet Humor, discussions of double standards surrounding Asians, women, and Asian women, and her family life (usually anecdotes about her Vietnamese mother, her then-husband, and their children).

Filmography (as actress):

Live-Action Roles

• Are You There, Chelsea? (2012): Olivia
• Black Box (2014): Lina Lark
• Inside Amy Schumer (2014-2015): Various
• American Housewife (2016-2021): Doris
• Ask the StoryBots (2018): Brain
• Always Be My Maybe (2019): Sasha Tran (also co-writer)
• Birds Of Prey (2020): Ellen Yee
• Paper Girls (2022): Erin Tieng (Adult)
• Beef (2023): Amy Lau

Voice Acting Roles

• The Angry Birds Movie (2016): Betty Bird
• The LEGO Ninjago Movie (2017): General Olivia
• Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018): Felony
• Tuca & Bertie (2019): Bertie
• Big Mouth (2019): Ali
  • Human Resources (2022): Becca
• Onward (2020): Gore
• Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe (2020); Super Super Big Doctor

Tropes in her works:

• Adored by the Network: By Netflix, in addition to her three comedy specials, she has appeared in a couple of Netflix originals, including the heavily-promoted Always Be My Maybe.
• Aggressive Submissive: Discusses this in Baby Cobra, where she says it's the most successful and in-control women who are submissive in bed.
• Celebrity Crush: In Don Wong she claims that her type is men who look like Keanu Reeves, a description her husband fits.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Mentions phoning it in while voicing a random Pixar character as one of the easy ways she dreamed of making cash as a famous person.
• A Degree in Useless: In one of her sets she considers her BA in Ethnic Studies, a degree where "you study how to blame everything on white people", a degree that wasn't expected to make money.
• Double Standard:
  • In Baby Cobra, she calls out the double standard for comedians who have children: female comics disappear, male comics get to go up on stage and crack jokes about fatherhood a week later. Wong defies this double standard by appearing visibly pregnant in two of her Netflix specials.
  • A running theme of Don Wong is that women cheating on their husbands is way more taboo than the reverse, so much that there's no real male equivalent to The Mistress in English.
• Elite School Means Elite Brain: Subverted in the special Baby Cobra. She makes a big deal about her husband being a Harvard alum, because she assumed he'd use the skills he learned there to be rich and successful and she can take it easy. Later, it turns out her husband was $70,000 in student debt, which she paid off with her TV money. She later admits that she's much wealthier than he is.
  So, as it turns out, he's the one who trapped me. How did he do it? How did he bamboozle me?
• Fake Orgasm: Discussed in Don Wong. She says that this is something women should not have to do anymore. She calls it "nutty ass shit" that is wildly indicative of how terrified women are of offending a man. She observes that women would rather fake an orgasm than say, "Hey, I just want to go home... This is so not awesome... You don't listen... [and] I'd really like to just go back to my house and fold clothes."
• Holiday in Cambodia: One of her jokes in Baby Cobra draws attention to how both her and her (then-)husband are half-East Asian and half-Southeast Asian (her Chinese/Vietnamese, him Japanese/Filipino). She draws a distinction between "fancy" East Asians and the "jungle" Southeast Asians.
  The fancy Asians are the Chinese, the Japanese. They get to do fancy things like host Olympics. Jungle Asians host diseases.
• I Resemble That Remark!: In Hard Knock Wife, she calls out people who assume she'd be bad at parking because she's an Asian woman, however...
  Those people who gather outside Asian women's cars when we're parking are so helpful and so racist at the same time. I'm always like 'thank you, thank you'... but 'fuck you'! For assuming correctly about me! I could not have done this without you!
• Impossibly Tacky Eyewear: She is known for her comically large eyeglasses, which she wears in her private life as well as in many of her onscreen roles.
• Marry the Nanny: Defies this in one of her jokes — she hired an elderly lady to nanny for her and her husband, because a hiring a "25-year-old pretty young thing" is a surefire way to destroy your marriage.
• Meaningful Release Date: Don Wong, a special comprised almost entirely of how she resents being a monogamous wife and mother before segueing into relatively sweeter jokes about how much she loves her husband by the end, was released on Valentine's Day.
• Romance on the Set: Joked about in Don Wong, when her friends would ask her if she would hook up with any of her co-stars on Always Be My Maybe. As the story goes, she almost hooked up with...the food coordinator.
• Stereotype Flip: One of her raunchier jokes is about her relationship with a man who has a micropenis. She drops the bomb when she reveals (to the audible shock of the audience) that he was a black guy. She compares it to seeing a homeless Asian person.
• Toilet Humor:
  • One comedic bit in Baby Cobra is about pooping and the pains of doing it in an office versus doing it at home.
  • An extended joke in Don Wong is that her colon got so backed up she had to have a colonoscopy.
• Trophy Wife: Backfired on her. In her first special, She believed that she could be a stay at home mom while her husband, an Ivy League graduate with a famous dad, would be easy street for her. Come Hard Knock Wife, she learns that not only does she get tired of being a mom who never rests at all, but her husband was in such colossal debt (which she paid off) that he's ultimately the one who believes he can knock off on his job while she carries the weight.

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