by Ali Wong
One of the worst places I performed regularly at was Our Little Theater. It literally seated eight people and was located in the heart of the Tenderloin District. That neighborhood was home to Southeast Asian refugees, a million drug addicts, and a truly remarkable amount of human feces on the street. There was no time to think about my set when walking to Our Little Theater because I was too busy trying not to get robbed and jumping over doo-doo and syringes on the sidewalk. That’s a game of hopscotch you need to win. Because if you lose, your consolation prize is ebola. Then there was the Marsh’s Mock Café that had no mic stand, no stool, and no mic. There was no advertisement for the show. You had to stand outside and “bark” at strangers to please come inside, then yell your jokes at them because, again, no mic…at an open…mic.
A comic once told me to never take a stand-up comedy class because it’s hacky. And it is hacky. If you disregard my advice and pursue stand-up, please at least do not ever take one of those courses. Doing the open-mic circuit is real stand-up comedy class. That’s when you really find out if you have the strength and stamina to make a real audience laugh. The audiences for those stand-up comedy class shows are made up of friends and family of the students in the class. It’s not a real audience. Those laughs aren’t genuine. Those classes are a sham because they’re too safe and nobody will respect you if they ever learn you took them. Again, if you become stand-ups, I’ll be riddled with anxiety. But if you become stand-ups and take those classes, I’ll say you’re not my children.
Stand-up is not supposed to be warm and fuzzy or welcoming. If it was, everyone would do it. Some people think that stand-ups are all dysfunctional or have mental health problems or bad families. But I think all you need to be a good stand-up is to have a unique point of view, be funny, and enjoy bombing in front of strangers. You really do have to learn to like bombing a lot. Even now, when the audience is too good, sometimes I think, I didn’t deserve that. You’ll know you’re a stand-up when, after a spectacular bomb, you don’t feel like you want to quit, but instead the opposite: You want to go up again. If you don’t bomb, you’ll think you’re good and there’s no work to do. But there’s always work to do. That’s the beauty of stand-up. A joke is never finished. There’s always more material to write. A joke can always age or get stale. It ain’t music, where Mariah can sing “All I Want for Christmas” over and over. (That’s my favorite song and if you don’t like it, again, I’ll say you’re not my children.) In that sense, stand-up is a lot like fashion: It demands innovation with every new show, and you’re only as good as your last collection.
Anyway, the big goal at the time was to get in at the San Francisco Punch Line to get a hosting gig. But when you host, you have to go up first, in front of a cold audience that isn’t there to see you and is getting served drinks while you’re doing your best to fluff them. They haven’t had any alcohol yet. I hated hosting so hard and am so relieved to not have to do it anymore. I missed my oldest sister’s bachelorette party, which was a small getaway in Napa, to host for a semi-high-profile headliner at a club in Sacramento. At the time, he was in his seventies and I was so excited to meet him and work with him that week. I left San Francisco at three-thirty P.M., drove in rush hour Friday traffic and arrived at the club at seven P.M. for an eight P.M. show start. I waited and waited and his feature act assured me that he would show up by eight forty-five P.M. He arrived five minutes before his headlining set at eight-forty P.M. and I enthusiastically greeted him: “Hi! I’m Ali. I’m the host for this week. Is there anything you want me to say in particular for your intro?” He didn’t answer me; he didn’t even look at me. He just walked past me into the green room and closed the door, which I took as a clear message that I was never to step in there again for the entire week. Still, after reminding the crowd to tip the bar and waitstaff, I gave the man a glowing intro with all of his TV credits, and talked about how much I looked up to him. Usually when I introduce somebody to an audience, there’s some sort of handshake or hug, a physical exchange between me and the person that is about to go up, to offer a connecting piece between me and the next performer. But again, he just walked past me like I wasn’t there. Too scared to go into the green room, I just hung outside of the club kitchen, sitting on a metal fold-out chair, where the smell of frozen chicken tenders and buffalo sauce enveloped me. I sat there laughing at his set, but also disappointed that some of his references were really old and obscure. El DeBarge and Macarena jokes don’t belong anywhere past the year 1998. At the second ten-thirty P.M. show, his feature opener left five minutes after he got offstage. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“To my hotel to sleep,” he responded. “Get ready to be here for a while.”
I wish he would’ve told me that “a while” meant until one-thirty A.M. As the host, you have to stay until the very end of the show to bookend it. Just to tell everyone good night and make whatever announcements the club needs you to make. My ass hurt from sitting on that metal chair and mostly I was concerned about the two-and-a-half-hour drive back home to San Francisco. Despite drinking two cups of coffee, my head was bobbing in and out of a sleepy state while I was driving my 1989 Volvo sedan on the freeway, blasting Tupac’s “California Love” to keep me awake. And on Saturday, I drove back to Sacramento and did it all over again. That week we did a total of four shows together and not once did he ever make eye contact with me. Maybe you wanted some sort of #MeToo story about hosting. But someone doesn’t have to grab your ass for him to be an asshole.
Sunday was the local stand-up comedy showcase at the San Francisco Punch Line Comedy Club. At the time, Kevin Avery, Joe Klocek, or W. Kamau Bell would always close the show. A handful of other San Francisco comedy veterans who had been living there for over a decade were all guaranteed a spot. A lot of them were in their forties and extremely bitter. Some of them had tried to move to L.A. and failed. Some of them never even tried. There were only thirteen spots on that Sunday showcase and up to sixty comics watching and waiting from the back, at the bar, hoping to get one of those spots. The booker, Molly Schminke, a beautiful majestic tattooed red-headed mermaid, would somehow keep track of all the comics and how long and how consistently they had been waiting. Often people had to sit back there for a year and a half before getting their first spot/audition on the Sunday showcase. When I finally went up, when I finally got my chance after months of waiting…I ate it. I was so nervous and had worked so hard on that seven-minute set but it was met with utter silence and awkward stares. I bombed so bad that other comics didn’t want to talk to me or look me in the eye afterward because they didn’t want to have to acknowledge the tragedy that had just passed onstage. That’s when you know you really died up there: when other comics treat you like you just farted. But I kept coming every Sunday.
Molly gave me another shot three months later, and I killed. Then she had me host the Sunday showcase three months after that, and I got my first hosting gig with Rex Navarrete. Eventually I got to host for Dave Chappelle, Dave Attell, Doug Benson, Marc Maron, Patrice O’Neal, and Janeane Garofalo, all of whom helped me later on in life.
But the Punch Line did not offer enough stage time with the Sunday showcase and twice-per-year hosting gigs, so I would go to the alternative rooms to grow. These were monthly shows people would put on at bookstores, restaurants, community centers, and rock clubs. With the skills I learned from LCC, an Asian American student theater group I joined at UCLA, I produced and promoted my own shows right away. Some of my favorite stand-up comedy show titles were Hustle and Pho, The Cameltoe Show, and Jungle Beaver. It was the only way I could headline and do an hour of material, since I was limited to five minutes at the open mics, fifteen minutes hosting the Punch Line, and twenty minutes max at other people’s alternative shows. I was very dirty back then. Even now I’ll look back on those days and think, God, you were disgusting. I would talk about having to waddle to the toilet, with my hand cupped below my pussy to cat
ch cum drippings after sex. I’d also put my foot up on the stool and mime splashing water on my vagina in a sink, to get rid of the dried pussy flakes, right before having sex.
Chris Garcia and I started a stand-up and sketch variety show called Rice and Beans.
One night, after a year of solid friendship, it was my birthday, and we went out and got extremely drunk at a club on Haight Street. When we were getting ready to call it a night, he ran into the middle of traffic and started waving his penis around. My friend Vanessa said it was like a very primal mating call. And then in the back of Vanessa’s Volvo sedan (this was a very popular car at the time in the Bay Area, before Subaru took over with their chic lesbian appeal), we started to make out. I threw up all over him, and then we kept making out.
We got into a relationship right away. It was the first time I ever had a serious boyfriend who wasn’t Asian American. Chris was Cuban American, a party dog, and very funny. We decided to keep our relationship a secret to avoid people treating us differently (this is a weird high school thing to do, but the SF comedy scene was high school part two). People would ask if we were dating and he’d respond: “No way, dude, she looks like a Monchhichi doll. Anne Geddes babies are not my thing.” I loved to write jokes with him at this tiny table at the Brainwash Café. We’d sit there in the corner, roasting all of the eccentric people coming and going. There was one comic who had long hair in front of his face and as he went up onstage, Chris said to me, “Oh, I didn’t recognize Slash without the guitar.” At our Rice and Beans sketch show, we performed another sketch called “American Apparel” where we both wore tight unitards, wristbands, tube socks, and headbands and would dance to bad techno SoulCycle instrumentals while whispering “American Apparel” over and over again. Chris bent over in front of the audience and let one of his balls pop out. Again, him and those primal mating calls. We were just young and dumb.
But things started to fall apart eventually. I got frustrated because, like many men I had been drawn to before, he did some irresponsible-ass shit that made me feel like his mom. He borrowed my sister’s car and it got towed twice in San Jose because he didn’t read the damn parking signs. When we broke up, he said to me, “Look, we’re just different, okay? You like to save money and take care of your body. I like to go to the mall and eat hot dogs.” That is ultimately not a flattering thing to say about yourself but it was so honest and makes us both laugh to this day. It took a long time, but now Chris and I are friends. He was my only stand-up comedy friend who came to my father’s funeral. Years later, when he had gotten married and I was already married and had Mari, I made sure to attend his father’s funeral as well. In tears from Chris’s moving eulogy, I approached his mother and asked, “Me recuerdes?” (Remember me?)
She shook her head.
“Soy la novia Chinita que encanto su arroz con pollo.” (I’m the small Chinese girlfriend who loved your chicken with rice.)
“Ohhhhhh!!!!!” She laughed, through tears, and squeezed my arm. “Gracias por venir.” (Thank you for coming.)
* * *
As much as I would love having you girls live near me, you will thrive if you move somewhere else. At some point you gotta go. Mama loves you but it’s so important to get out of your hometown and get the fuck away from your family. As the youngest of four kids, I was always being observed by my siblings, who would judge my every decision. They had a set idea of who I was and it affected me. It was limiting. Everything I said generally had no credence because I was at least ten years younger than every single person in my family, so what did I really know? When I got away from them, I finally felt like I could be the person I was meant to be, which just happened to be a person who talked about her wish to put nail polish remover in men’s buttholes so she could accomplish two things at once. Chances are that neither of you is also that person.
My family had always told me how to speak and how to feel about things. Part of what was so liberating about being onstage was that I could say whatever I wanted without having loved ones comment on it. Regardless of how the strangers would respond, at least they were strangers who didn’t know me or have any real authority over who I was. I loved the anonymity of my conversations with an audience.
But deciding to move to NYC after four years of doing stand-up in San Francisco was hard. Before I packed up, my best friend told me how her friend had witnessed a rat giving birth on a homeless lady’s lap on the subway. And that single image pretty much sums up New York. I lived in a loft with eight other people, including that sixty-seven-year-old Russian lady. I temporarily filled in as the receptionist at a cleft palate surgery non-profit.
I was twenty-six at the time, and there were girls who were just out of college ordering me around. They had much nicer bags and shoes than I did. I remember admiring this one program director’s bag, and thought I could afford it since it was nylon. She was horrified that I wasn’t already familiar with the “Longchamp Le Pliage” bag and told me it was a “staple” in every woman’s closet. I immediately looked it up online and saw that it cost over a hundred dollars. For a nylon bag. I thought, Bitch, I could eat twenty-five Mamoun’s falafel sandwiches for that bag.
Every day in NYC was about spending as little money as possible. I didn’t see any movies or eat out unless I went out on a date, or it was pizza or falafel. Ninety percent of the time I cooked at the SoHo loft. I’d buy lentils from a bulk bin at an East Village co-op and boil them to eat with salt, like a medieval peasant. And then I’d steam some vegetables from Chinatown. For three dollars and fifty cents, I found a place that sold half of a cooked chicken that was probably loaded with enough antibiotics to turn my blood into Purell.
NYC is and was cartoonishly expensive. Once, in the middle of the night, I got my period and was very unprepared. I had no choice but to walk to the local bodega in SoHo to load up on all the necessary gear. Midol and tampons cost me fifteen dollars (that’s a lot). There was no beloved Costco or Target to rely on. Instead, I was forced to “support a local business,” and that business returned the favor by price gouging the shit out of me. I could’ve put a down payment on one of those overpriced French nylon bags for all the money I spent that evening.
Friends and family kept asking me how I was doing in NYC and I just didn’t know what to tell them. They were wondering, “So have you MADE IT YET??!!” And no, I never really made it in New York. But in retrospect, the loneliness was good for me. It caused me to focus. There were nights where I would perform nine sets in one evening because that was the whole purpose of me moving to NYC, but also there was nothing else for me to do.
Years later, I returned to New York to play an agoraphobic radiologist on an ABC medical drama called Black Box. I was so excited to finally have money in New York and literally screamed, “Started from the bottom, now we here!” as I got off the plane. I arrived at my West Village apartment, said hi to my two other roommates, started sweating trying to squeeze my suitcases into my tiny-ass bedroom, and then whispered to myself, “Oh fuck, I’m still at the bottom.” That apartment was the best I could afford. The shower was the size of an RV shower, and the water turned from cold to hot, hot to cold very fast, which I’m pretty sure is the same technique they used to torture prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. I would have to do breathing exercises before getting in that telephone booth of water hell.
* * *
As a female comic, it was always hard to not date a stand-up comedian. Mostly because when I dated men outside of stand-up comedy, their attempts at funny made me cringe. One guy pointed to an escalator that was out of order and said to me, “Escalators that are out of order are basically temporary stairs.” I said to him, “That’s a Mitch Hedberg joke.” He said to me, “Oh, I just came up with that thought on my own by myself.” Shut up, you fucking liar. One Filipino guy said to me, “I’m not a Jew, I’m Jew-ISH.” It made no sense because, first of all, he was a Filipino Catholic and not even part Jewish
. Second of all, that was another old joke stolen from a real comedian.
Then a white guy tried to neg me after a show and said, “Hey, are you Asian, or do you just look sleepy?” First of all, so racist and rude. Second of all, that’s a racist and rude Don Rickles joke, you dickhead.
Male friends of your father have told me that it makes them uncomfortable that I’m professionally funny. They get angry at me for not laughing at their dumb stories about their wives. “She makes a fuss when I put all my stuff in her purse and I’m like, look how many shoes you put into my closet! Hahahahahahaha!” At a wedding, one of them came up to me and said, “Hey, Ali, my wife is so bossy, she always gets on my case for not putting the toilet seat down. I’ll put down the toilet seat once you put down that People magazine!” I just want to shake these men by the shoulders and say, “You will never be funnier than me and that’s okay. Don’t worry, you still have a bigger dick than me!”
Pretty much the worst thing about being a woman in stand-up is that you are always forced to socialize with male stand-up comics’ girlfriends. You become a babysitter for these poor women. At a club once, this comic dumped his life-sized Barbie doll of a girlfriend next to me, like, Hey, can you watch this? To be fair, she was perfectly nice and was showing me all of the fancy stuff on her body that her boyfriend had bought her. “I mean, just look at this diamond. It’s a honey diamond, which I think is a very chic alternative to a basic diamond. Honey because it’s the color of honey!” she exclaimed as she searched for light to rotate her wrist in, to maximize the sparkle on her finger. “Look at my Casio digital watch,” I replied as I offered my wrist to her hands. “It cost $19.99, and it displays the time AND date!” She didn’t get the sarcasm and instead pretended to just be super impressed. “Oh my God! That’s really um…useful and such a neat retro watch! You’re like one of those kids riding a bike in E.T.!” Again, she was perfectly nice but it was grueling talking to someone who didn’t understand sarcasm.