African American English, racialized femininities, and Asian American identity in Ali Wong's Baby Cobra

We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand‐up special, Baby Cobra, through a genre‐specific lens to investigate how stand‐up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms inde...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of sociolinguistics 2024-09, Vol.28 (4), p.64-84
Main Authors: Calhoun, Kendra, Yoo, Joyhanna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African American English
African American language
African Americans
American English
Asian Americans
comedy
gender
Hegemony
Ideology
Infants
Language varieties
Personhood
Race
Racialization
Sociolinguistics
Stand-up comedy
Wong, Ali
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Summary:We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand‐up special, Baby Cobra, through a genre‐specific lens to investigate how stand‐up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white “Karen,” “sassy Black woman,” and “Asian grandmother.” This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti‐Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, “Asian American” as an ethnoracial category vis‐à‐vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected.
ISSN:1360-6441
1467-9841
DOI:10.1111/josl.12673