Friday, April 26, 2019

All Hail Ali Wong

As Vanity Fair’s Radhika Jones reveals in her most recent editor’s letter, it was Ali Wong’s idea to dress up as Marie Antoinette for a lavish photo shoot in our May issue—“a thumb in the eye to the kind of decadent presentation that Ali eschews in her professional life,” Jones writes, “but also, I suspect, a fun excuse to lie on a chaise lounge and be fed grapes while wearing an extravagant wig.” That speaks to the force of Wong’s personality: fierce, irreverent, and very, very funny, as Julie Miller discovered while spending a day with the rising comedy star, who burst onto the scene with 2016’s Baby Cobra, filmed when Wong was seven months pregnant with her second child. As her daughters, Mariand Nikki, grow up, Miller writes, “Wong continues to blow up stereotypes, parenting double-standards, and antiquated stigmas, clearing a path for future generations of less inhibited female comics. Perhaps the greatest testament to her plan to counter her own observation about the absence of mothers in stand-up is the fact that she made sure each daughter had her own in-utero Netflix special.” (The second, Hard Knock Wife, came out in 2018.) Wong will have no more kids, she told Miller. But “there will be more specials.”
Elsewhere in HWD, Joanna Robinson parses a few new Game of Thrones photos ahead of Sunday’s momentous battle episode; Josh Duboff checks in on Olivia Jade,teenage influencer and daughter of accused U.S.C. briber Lori Loughlin; Yohana Desta ponders just how long it will take Avengers: Endgame to cross the $1 billion mark; and Joy Press gives a toast to Ana Gasteyer, one of several funny ladies and real-life pals starring in Amy Poehler’s directorial debut, Wine Country.