Margaret Cho’s focus on toilet parts radiantly funny
by Adrian Mack
The Vancouver Straight
Margaret Cho’s performance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday was so bracingly filthy that you wondered if people were cheering for the punch lines or the sheer nastiness of it all.
Either way, it was a good night for the veteran comedian, who’s been hitting the road to support her first album of music, Cho Dependent.
Cho gave us three numbers between all the standup, with a Carl Newman cowrite called “Your Dick” being the best, and a rap song called “My Puss”—delivered in her mom’s exaggerated accent—easily the most scabrous. Along with her mother’s puss, Cho’s spoken material was strongly focused on her own toilet parts, most memorably in the first couple minutes of the show, when she explained why she farts a “fine mist” of extra virgin olive oil these days.
We were all pretty intimate with Cho’s ass by the end of the night. She spoke at length about her “shy hole”, her newfound taste for anal, and her desire to co-opt the end-to-end gay strategy known as “the spit roast”. “But I’m Korean,” she frowned, “and we like barbecue.”
There were digressions into cock, California’s Prop 8, queefs, white people, geriatric strippers, sperm donors, sexting her mom by accident, cock, cock, more cock, and—being that this was Vancouver—her passion for weed. “Last time I was here,” she said, “I got so fucking stoned that I bought $5,000 worth of yoga gear.”
One of her best bits was about living as a bisexual Asian in super-white Peachtree City, Georgia, for the half of the year she spends shooting Drop Dead Diva. “It’s weird when your apartment is the ghetto, the gay neighbourhood, and Chinatown,” she said. “It’s a lot of pressure.”
Cho scored a lot of points off of stereotypes, noting that “the only time Koreans show emotion is when someone either dies or shoplifts”, or launching into ludicrously broad (and gut-busting) caricatures of her own family. It’s not exactly fresh, but Cho is too smooth and radiantly funny for anybody to care, and it’s odd how she manages to be so cheerfully gross without really coming off as terribly offensive, even when she’s fantasizing about sleep-raping a guy and sucking up his junk “like a jello shot”.
More to the point, it’s just nice to have somebody advocating for those of us who combine a pornographic imagination with simple ambitions. There probably wasn’t anybody in the theatre who didn’t relate when Cho said, “You know, I’m 41, and my goal in life is to just keep getting fucked.”