It's Mother-Effing It's Time

Ali Wong’s second Netflix special, Hard Knock Wife, can’t come soon enough for the exhausted, strung-out, fired-up moms of America.

- Doree Shafrir

Comedy may be all about breaking rules, but until Ali Wong got onstage seven-and-a-half-months pregnant to shoot her 2016 Netflix special, Baby Cobra, nobody had broken the unspoken taboo of a visibly pregnant comedian making jokes about pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, and having to scratch your vagina under the conference room table because you’ve been taking progesterone suppositories. In a world where the same tired dick jokes have been told by aging male comedians since the days of the Borscht Belt, Cobra was a smash hit. Netflix immediately signed on for Wong’s second special, Hard Knock Wife, which comes out this Mother’s Day and which she shot last year, when she was (again, visibly) pregnant with her second child.

One of the most slyly subversive things about Hard Knock Wife is when Wong admits that she was wrong about motherhood. That is, she was wrong about the somewhat absurd version of motherhood that she joked and fantasized about in Baby Cobra: that being a stay-at-home mom was an easy job where you got to lounge around all day watching TV, having lunch with your girlfriends, and getting to poop in the privacy of your own bathroom.

“I didn’t understand that the whole price you had to pay for staying at home is that you gotta be a mom,” she says in Hard Knock Wife, calling the gig a “wackass job” with crappy benefits. “You’re just in solitary confinement all day long with this human Tamagotchi that don’t got no reset button. So the stakes are extremely high.” (That’s your one and only spoiler, by the way.)