Don Wong

Most comedians wait until after the divorce papers are filed to build an hour around hating their marriage, but Ali Wong chose to do it while still legally bound.

Filmed at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey, this third Netflix hour is less of a standard stand-up set and more of an extended, hyper-explicit plea for release from the confines of domesticity. She is wealthy, famous, and completely miserable about the reality of monogamy, using the stage to detail her deep jealousy of single people and her fantasy of sleeping with the entire cast of The Avengers.

Wong frames her material through the lens of gender disparity, starting with how much better male comics have it when they achieve fame. While successful men end up dating supermodels, she points out that successful female comedians are left dating two-star Yelp-rated magicians. The rest of the hour leans heavily into graphic sexual confessionals, including the low quality of her direct messages, which are mostly populated by creepy, zero-follower accounts requesting to smell her feet, and the exhaustion of maintaining a marriage where she wants to cheat every five minutes.

Released on Valentine’s Day in 2022, the special took on a retrospective status when Wong and her husband announced their amicable split just two months later. Critics and audiences were divided on the performance. While some praised her high-energy refusal to court likability, others felt the hour lacked the grounded specificity of Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife, occasionally slipping into repetitive complaints about the burdens of her own fame and wealth.