Redef ining Sel f
ATLANTA TRIBUNE the magazine
November 2023
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I RARELY GET ASKED WHAT I THINK IS A MORE INTERESTING QUESTION: HOW DO YOU OVERCOME FAILURE? (MY ANSWER, IF YOU’RE CURIOUS, CENTERS ON HAVING A TOLERANCE FOR DELAYED GRATIFICATION, A PASSION FOR THE CRAFT, AND A WILLINGNESS TO FAIL.) UNFORTUNATELY, MOST PEOPLE HAVE BEEN CONDITIONED TO DEFINE OTHER PEOPLE VIA RACE AND GENDER. EVEN ME. WHENEVER FRIENDS TELL ME THEY’RE DATING SOMEBODY NEW, I ALWAYS ASK, “WHAT RACE IS HE?” THEIR ANSWER: “HE’S A WHITE MAN, ALI, OKAY?” AND MY RESPONSE IS
How Defying Yourself Makes You Unfunny
Reintroducing
Ali Wong E
N YE
E ELL
li Wong for Atlanta the magazine
Letter from the Editor
03-06, 12
Reintroducing Ali Wong
Table of Contents
01
Redef ining Sel f
Letter from the Editor Our Editor, Sydney Toner, was born in Rochester, New York, but grew up in Woodstock, Georgia. Her goal as a student is to learn as much as possible from those around her, including fellow students and professors. As an artist, Sydney desires to push the boundaries and rules already in place by “breaking the rules successfully”. In 5 years, she sees herself with a full-time corporate job, living in a loft apartment, and traveling when her work schedule allows. In 10 years, she hopes to continue her graphic design work in a corporate setting, living in a house, and happily married. Her life experiences and world travels have shaped her creative direction, which involves rejection, life events, feelings, things she has seen in the world around her, and other cultures she has immersed herself in. Sydney finds immersive and interactive art to be the most inspirational. Her spirit tool is Adobe InDesign. Some of her accomplishments involve completing the AIGA mentorship 2023 program as a mentee, serving as Co-Communications chair for the AIGA Atlanta Student Board, and completing her minor in Sociology.
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“Graphic design is a functional form of design. It often serves a purpose, solves problems, and has an overall outcome that it must achieve. Because of this, I aim to create functional and aesthetically pleasing designs that deter and push the boundaries of traditional design methods. I enjoy brutalist design and find punkrock inspirational; both are, in their roots, anti-design. However, I can adapt to many design aesthetics because I do not limit myself to just one aesthetic or niche. In my designs, I find ways to “have fun within the box,” the box being the limits of student assignments. My artistic process starts with mood boards and sketches. From there, I will reiterate and slightly adjust the designs until one is successful. The material I use is all industry standard. My learning over the past few years has focused on understanding the necessary programs, and others that will aid my success in the industry.” Best,
Sydney Toner
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Redef ining Sel f
Reintroducing Ali says, “I never sought to be famous. I just wanted to tell jokes for a living. I probably could have been happy being a comic and doing clubs forever.”
T
Ali
How Defying Yourself Makes You Unfunny
ucked away in a nook at Etta, one of her favorite restaurants in Los Angeles, Wong is instantly recognized by the waiters, who send over gifts from the kitchen throughout our meal. Newly single after a much-scrutinized divorce, and feasting on crudo, cacio e pepe, and mushroom pizza, Wong says she’s feeling inspired as she embarks on a new chapter in her personal and professional life. She beams when describing her first foray on the dating apps at 40 years old. “I thought in my lifetime I’d never get to do that,” she says with childlike glee. “It sounded so exciting to have all of these people at my fingertips to judge.” There’s that familiar punchline. Wong’s star is post-risen, and yet she’s visibly uneasy when discussing a level of fame that has pivoted her from stand-up comedian to comedian-slash-celebrity. She’s got the former down pat, but the latter has her more unsure. She questions her stardom, but what she really seems to interrogate is what that fame will do to the thing she knows best: comedy. For instance, after Wong joked about miscarriages in her breakout 2016 comedy special, Baby Cobra, First Lady Michelle Obama sent her a letter that she now has framed in her living room. “It meant a lot to me,” she says, “but I can’t set out on every special being like, I’m going to do this hour to get another letter out of Michelle Obama.” She laughs, then, after a beat, dryly adds: “I think that when people start to deify themselves, that’s when you become unfunny.”
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On Beef, her new Netflix series, helmed by creator Lee Sung Jin (Wong calls him Sonny), she plays Amy, a self-made businesswoman
Extreme Cashmere dress. Sophie Buhai necklace.
Article by Evan Ross Katz
Redef ining Sel f
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When people start to deify themselves, that’s when they become unfunny.
Yohji Yamamoto (archive) top. Bless Service shorts. Manolo Blahnik (vintage) shoes. Photo: Noua Unu Studio
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Wong
Inside the Multi-Dimensional World of Ali Wong
lonely contractor played by Steven Yeun. To call it a dramedy would be too easy; it’s really more of a thriller. Wong had a lot to learn: how to masturbate using the barrel of a gun, the one-two punch of wrestling in a wig, and her very first onscreen sex scene. “I told him to spit on it!” she tells me. “I also ad-libbed some butt stuff … but it didn’t make it in.” When Wong heard about Beef, she was eager to pour herself into a project. Another stand-up special would have been easy, but she had already proven herself in that arena. Something else led her here: “I always come back to instinct and emotion in everything that I do,” she says. “It’s always an abstraction of the truth. Like with Beef, even though I didn’t write it, all of those emotions are connecting to something real for me, and whatever that is specifically I could never articulate because it all came from some sort of instinct when I read those words.” This is uncharted territory for the performer. A venerated comedian with three Netflix specials packed into her increasingly dense and kaleidoscopic resume, Wong has been in the public eye since her breakout 2016 special, Baby Cobra. Since then, she has released a New York Times best-selling book, walked at New York Fashion Week, appeared in a superhero film, and even gracefully maneuvered a public separation from her husband. But her latest effort is, as she describes it, the “most interesting” thing she’s ever done. That aforementioned lifelong anxiety about becoming unfunny has led her to lean into the fear and star in this intense, semiautobiographical role.
Wong is pragmatic in how meticulously she has crafted her seemingly devil-may-care onstage persona. Now that her career has deviated once again, can she find happiness in taking an artistic leap of faith? She finds solace in a scene from the first episode of Beef in which her character puts her daughter to bed and spins a yarn about the mechanics of childbirth, explaining that she was so happy the day she brought her child into the world. She gets lost in the memory, telling her that she wishes she could have stayed in that hospital bed
Article by Evan Ross Katz
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Redef ining Sel f
None of that voice stuff, none of that compelling shit matters if it’s not funny.
“ Article by Evan Ross Katz
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