Ali Wong Quotes

All of these people in the industry kept on telling me: ‘You’re likable and you’re cute, or whatever, but the jokes are really dirty and you’d get booked a lot more, and you’d be a lot more appealing if they were clean’…Maybe people were half-laughing, half-cringing at my jokes. But if you’re successful, people should be too busy laughing to cringe.

I want to have it all. I want to have a family, a career, and a side piece.

You know, it's tough when you have to wait around for other people to write something for you, because there's no precedent for someone who looks like you to play certain characters, right? So it's such a unique character that I've been dying to see and put on camera for a long time, that [Park] plays. And that's something for me that's really personal.

Maybe it’s because women feel they want to maintain some mystery that they’re not gross, to be more attractive or something. For me it’s all part of intimacy. That’s how I define intimacy – living closer and being more honest, closer to what your real desires are – and it’s exciting.

I think [if you] consume mainstream pop culture and don’t activate a search for any other niche outlets then you can fall into this feeling that you are inferior.

I was very dirty back then. Even now, I’ll look back on those days and think: ‘God, you were disgusting.’

I see kids and how young they really are and I cannot imagine them coming on a boat by themselves, going to another country to work and be separated from their parents. It really humbles me and makes me grateful and it gave me a huge sense of…It’s part of my identity and gave me a very strong work ethic.

...Not at all. It’s interesting. I was an Asian-American studies major in college. For a long time, I thought I would go into academia and become an Asian-American professor, and then I fell in love with stand-up comedy. I never set out to specifically speak about representation though — it’s so hard to even just make a joke. I do whatever is first and foremost funny and interesting. Sometimes that happens to concern Asian-American identity, but not a lot of it. But it is something I will always be interested in.