Good news ladies: getting divorced in your forties is awesome!
That’s the word from Ali Wong in her latest Netflix stand-up comedy special, Ali Wong: Single Lady.
For this show, Wong looks like a wedding guest in an elegant, white, disarmingly pretty dress. Set against a backdrop of shimmering pink curtains, she looks like a beautiful bird emerging from a coffin of marital strife.
It is a very different look from her first two Netflix specials, especially the one that started it all, 2016’s Baby Cobra. Wong wore a fierce, tight, stretchy maternity dress in those specials, making her look about 11 months pregnant in each. It was a visually hilarious way to reinforce stand-up sets that blew the lid off conventional thinking in terms of motherhood, childbirth, breastfeeding and sex.
Wong’s latest special deconstructs the notion that divorce at 40 is a terrible social and economic setback for many women in middle age.
“I really do believe that 40 is the golden age – to get divorced,” declares Wong. “It’s perfect.”
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Viewers at home and inside the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles are not told any details about Wong’s divorce from her starter husband after ten years of marriage and two children. Previous specials had Wong goofing on how she had to put her man through college. The most recent special, Don Wong, did not make marriage sound fun and kind of set her audience up for the Single Lady coming out party.
Much of the hour plus on stage is spent cataloguing her recent dating adventures.
“I can go as low as 25 and I can go as high as 55,” she says, casting a wide net in terms of age, although later she admits one dude who was 60 – and fit – lied and was actually five years older than it said on his dating app profile. Still, the lad was lively enough in the sheets to earn a return engagement.
Wong further states that men have a different scale when dating at an older age.
“In your twenties, all you want to date is a ten,” she says. When men become forty, she asserts, men don’t want a ten anymore. They want “a kind six who earns at least 50k a year.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that Wong is way past a six. She also earns a lot more than 50k. Career-wise, she is at her peak after earning an Emmy award for her audacious performance in the sizzling drama Meat. She is, in short, a helluva catch, and knows it.
She even jokes that she always expects the man to pay for the first date, even though she’s a millionaire. She’s very matter-of-fact about how she can simply fly her suitors out to see her in LA.
She is hilariously dispassionate about the usual social and economic confines of being a newly divorced, single mother of two. She is in a rare category of independence and is taking full advantage – not just for her own sexual fulfilment, but also in her search for fodder for her comedy specials.
And why not? As she jokes, her divorce was out there, all over social media. It was, she says, like a bat signal for men, and suddenly she was pursued like she had never been before in her life.
Wong’s utter lack of vulnerability and her cheeky swagger is cheered by the theatre audience because it is so brazen and because it sounds different – like how a man might crow about being single in his forties. [For the uninitiated, she is also shockingly brazen in her sex talk. Her act is strictly for adults.]
Viewers get to hear details about her dates, the young one who needed a tutor more than a lover, the white guy who did not have a clue when it came to which bowl to use in an Asian restaurant.
None of these men are named, nor is the fellow she is currently in a steady relationship with: Barry and Saturday Night Live star Bill Hader. That secret has been out for a while, but for purposes of constructing this stand-up set, the happy ending is held back until the very end. That’s when Wong does seem a bit more like a kind woman in her forties and even a little bit in love. Clearly, she has found another millionaire who is also funny and bright and would love, get and appreciate the research that went into hooking up with all of these men she was able to turn into one night stand-up jokes.
Undoubtedly, we’ll see how that all goes in her next stand-up special.
