Stream It Or Skip It?

You may have noticed a pattern across Cristela Alonzo’s three stand-up comedy specials on Netflix, as she debuted Cristela Alonzo: Lower Classy in 2016, followed it up with Cristela Alonzo: Middle Classy in 2022, and now has finally reached Upper Classy. And yes, while Alonzo does reckon with her upward mobility over the years, she’s really more interested in demonstrating how she embodies the American Dream, and why that’s more important than ever for others to see and hear in 2025.

The Gist: Since the release of her second Netflix special, Alonzo has popped up on TV most frequently as a team captain on the revived game show, Pictionary. You also may have spotted her as a recurring guest on The Talk, a couple of episodes of Netflix sitcom, The Upshaws, or as a guest judge on the Netflix cooking competition, Is It Cake? She also served as a consulting producer on the short-lived NBC Reba McEntire sitcom, Happy’s Place.

This special finds Alonzo firmly in her happy place, but wondering how she can teach her own family to find theirs, too, taking them on trips to Hawaii, Disneyland, and the Grand Canyon.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?:  A decade removed from her own ABC sitcom, Alonzo has become a powerful voice for Latino comedians and thereby entered her George Lopez era (complimentary).

In a funny (weird, ironic) twist, much like Andrew Santino who released his new special White Noise on Hulu earlier this month, Alonzo has a “white noise” joke in her hour. But her joke, unlike his, focuses solely on the whiteness: “I have my white noise machine, which is just Karens yelling at me, ‘Do you live here?!’”

Memorable Jokes: Alonzo has never shied away from her heritage as a first-generation Mexican-American, and in this hour opens and closes her special with big declarations, whether it’s joking about how her glass of water onstage contains no ice, or draping herself with a Mexican serape blanket at the end that’s adorned with the 50 stars of the U.S. flag.

In between, she jokes about having “therapy money,” even if her Latina upbringing, both poor and Catholic, makes her wary about self-care. Even more so as she describes in detail what happened when she realized ordering a body scrub at the spa was not as simple and straight-forward as she thought. Or perhaps it was too straight-forward? You get a real sense for Alonzo’s body insecurity as she acts out her movements through the spa, from the locker room to the jacuzzi and then her ordeal with the masseuse.

She makes light of it later by describing her first night owning a Fitbit during the pandemic. It did not go well.

For all of her insecurity, though, she wasn’t so worried about adhering to traditional gender roles, as she describes having grown up wearing the hand-me-down clothes of her older brothers and preferring playing with He-Man over My Little Pony.

And she’s not about to take any guff about having no kids or a husband at 46. “It’s none of your business,” she says, adding with a quip: “I already raised children.” Her sister’s, that is, who showed up at Cristela’s doorstep with her three kids after leaving her husband.

Besides, since their mother died, Cristela has assumed the role of the family matriarch; even more so since she began enjoying TV and streaming success about a dozen years ago. In trying to teach her siblings how to have fun, she realized not only that they’d never been on a real vacation before, but also that Cristela herself, for all of her work travels as a stand-up, had never really traveled for fun. So off to Hawaii she took them first. Why there? “Because the Brady Bunch went there!”

Going into detail about their recent trips to Hawaii, to Disneyland, and to the Grand Canyon, she realizes just how little they’d ever allowed themselves to dream, and then how far they’ve come as a family, both literally and figuratively. All with jokes about how their own ideas of a vacation contrasted with those of the white people they saw all around them.

Our Take: Alonzo reminds her audience in Dallas that she started her stand-up career there, and that her family still calls the Texas border town of San Juan home. In all of their time there, they learned how to work hard and fit in, but “we are never taught to live hard” and find joy. It’s why her mom, an undocumented immigrant, worked double-shifts as a cook and never complained, despite earning only $150 a week and walking past the local movie theater, never to walk inside and enjoy a movie.

Alonzo even stops to ask aloud, why would she be telling us all of this in a comedy show? “It’s because we need to hear it,” she says, adding that “sometimes you need to hear it to feel like you have permission to do it.” Even when that’s about having fun. Especially at times like these.

So when she stands there onstage in Dallas, reminding us she just filmed her third Netflix special, in a state and a nation where people wear Jesus crucifixes while trying to separate boys and men named Jesus from their families, she’s not joking when she says: “This is the time to be vocal.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. When you see and hear her proclaim, “I am an example of what the American dream really is,” she’s teaching a generation of young Latinas to reach for their dreams, whether it’s in politics, in business, or even in stand-up comedy. It’s a message each and every demographic needs to see and hear for themselves. We all deserve our own heroes and our own humorists.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.