Ali Wong flashes Houston on her Milk & Money Tour
After rising to fame with her Netflix stand-up specials Baby Cobra (2016) and Hard-Knock Wife (2018), writer and comedian Ali Wong took Houston on in her sold out 2019 Milk & Money Tour. The crowd was filled with a number of pregnant women, many of them dressed up in Wong’s iconic Baby Cobra outfit—red-rimmed glasses and cheetah-print dress. This show held many firsts for me—I’d never had my phone locked away for a show before, and I’d never seen Wong, well, not pregnant.
Wong strutted onto stage to loud applause and cheers, wearing a dark dress and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. Sitting in the very last row, I had to strain my eyes to see, though I definitely didn’t have to strain to hear.
Wong opened her show addressing the differences between successful men and women in comedy. She attributed male success to the powerful “fan pussy” and the harder-to-attain female success to the horrors of “fan dick.” Despite the vulgar jokes, it’s easy to understand her stance on the struggles women face in a male-dominated industry.
One of Wong’s best attributes is her unashamed sexuality and unabashed vulgarity. She’s not afraid to dig into the nitty-gritty details of sex and motherhood, or lift her dress to talk about her pubic hair. This never fails to draw surprised laughs and screams from her enthusiastic, mostly-female audience.
Wong knows she’s successful and she’s proud of it. She rocks it — sometimes with her dress lifted to her midriff. She tells us she’s the breadwinner of her family who “accidentally” married a Harvard Business School graduate who now sells her merchandise outside of her shows.
Fellow comedian and Houston native Sheng Wang opened for Wong with a short, sweet act. Like Wong, Wang is a writer for ABC’s sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. Clad in a plaid shirt and hip glasses, he paced the stage with a voice that artfully bounced in pitch from low to squeaky as he talked about his immigrant parents and stealing fruit from his neighbors. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Wang proudly announced that his greatest accomplishment is being tall—because he is able to steal more fruits from more trees.
Wong is a woman I look up to. She’s one of the first people I’ve seen on TV that looks like me. She makes jokes that I can relate to and uses them to touch on sensitive and highly relevant topics. At one point in her act, she addressed the men in the audience, asking them if they had ever been with women who made more money than they did. The momentary silence answered for them.
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