Stand-Up Rerouting, or Cultural Transformation in Ali Wong’s Bawdy Comic Critique

ABSTRACT This article identifies and elaborates a form of comic persuasion called “stand-up rerouting,” showing how comedian Ali Wong’s stand-up in Netflix’s 2016 Baby Cobra transforms familiar conceptual norms, especially the conflicting binaries she faces as a woman and comedian. Drawing on the philosophical insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, Donna Haraway, and Gilbert Simondon as well as the feminist thought of Hélène Cixous and Trinh T. Minh-ha, the article traces Wong’s bawdy humor as it reroutes audience attention from a conceptual to a sensuous understanding of life. In embracing the tensions caused by normative expectations, and exploiting familiar cultural limits on identity in novel ways, Wong materializes alternative, nonbinary ways to reconcile tensions in her identities, transforming who and how she—and we—can be.