‘Cristela Alonzo: Upper Classy’ Review – Unadventurous Comedy Hides Moving Personal Insights

I’m a bit mixed on Cristela Alonzo. I don’t find her that funny, aside from the odd well-observed throwaway punchline that tends to punctuate longer bits. But I do find her deeply likable, strangely relatable, and a very good storyteller, which is sometimes more important, even in a comedy special. This was largely true of Middle Classy, Alonzo’s previous Netflix special, and it’s true of Upper Classy, too. Sure, I wasn’t rolling around howling at any point, but at least one section brought a tear to my eye with its earnest sentiment, and several others were buoyed by genuine insight into the immigrant experience, poverty, body image, and a bit more besides.

Alonzo is a Gen X’er, which doesn’t go unmentioned. That means not growing up with the internet and social media, and being subject to prevailing attitudes that these days would be considered woefully outdated. She describes being assumed to be gay as a child for liking toys aimed at boys instead of girls, which would be an extremely cliché observation if it weren’t for how it relates to Alonzo’s background specifically. Her “tomboy” demeanour was a reluctance to play with girls’ toys, which were all geared towards cooking and cleaning, because she was already cooking and cleaning at that age. It also tees up a genuinely funny observation about the homoeroticism of He-Man, which is fair enough.

The Gen X thing, and the background of extreme poverty – her family spent seven years squatting in an abandoned diner – backdrop all of Alonzo’s material. Even the stuff about body image – look out for a sharp line about Olympic breakdancing in a bit on an embarrassing spa trip – is informed by growing up Latina and stringently Catholic. The thematic consistency gives the special a coherence that pure observational comedy can sometimes lack. Alonzo’s life has been defined by these things, and her comedy follows suit.

This lends surprising emotional power to a good amount of the material, a lot of which has a horse’s-mouth quality in its details. The origin of Alonzo’s work ethic being her mother, who died without ever having been to the movies after putting such a trip on a pedestal that she considered herself unworthy of, is quietly emotional and very frank. This leads into Alonzo’s determination to ensure that none of her family ever feels that way again, which involves using her success to facilitate family trips to Hawai’i and Mexico, stories about which constitute the best stretch of Upper Classy.

While the perils of planning trips for relatives used to not going anywhere are good for a laugh, the earnest sentiment running through all this is what really defined the special for me. Alonzo’s brother’s long-fought battle for citizenship in the face of an indifferent and often arbitrary immigration system is one of the areas where Alonzo flirts explicitly with politics, but this isn’t a lecture. It’s a personal excavation in which the facts speak for themselves. Simply recalling the story about her brother’s most treasured memory being arriving in America from Mexico and seeing, for the first time, green grass, possible thanks to an abundance of water, brings a tear to Alonzo’s eye on stage, and I unexpectedly felt similarly emotional at the simplicity of that.

This and other allusions to the idea of the American dream and America as a rich utopia of opportunity keep Upper Classy from feeling bitter and preachy. Alonzo’s angle is different. She’s coming from the perspective of a beneficiary of that promised land, a believer in the dream it represents, and someone earnestly arguing for the values of family, hard work, and self-care that underpin it. You can’t say fairer than that.