Full
of attitude, dressed to the nines and raw as a paper cut, Margaret Cho
has staked her place in the world as a Korean-American, trash-talking,
shit-starting, fag-hag girl comic. And she’s coming right at us.
After more than 15 years of performing – and a series of life and career hurdles that have already earned her an E! Celebrity Profile – Cho has attracted a gaggle of fans in her wake. She’ll treat local admirers with a show at Mershon Auditorium on November 8.
Cho speaks to anyone – including herself – who strives for an unrealistic ideal, whether imposed by society, the self or both. She asks her audience to consider if there’s anything really wrong with any of us, as-is. Scotland’s Edinburgh News said of her appearance at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, “Cho is the rare kind of performer you leave walking a little lighter; not just because you have been royally entertained, but because you feel stronger and prouder than when you went in.”
The comic had ample and awful opportunities to explore her own self-worth as the country’s first Asian-American sitcom star in the 1995 ABC series All-American Girl.
The show was supposed to be a vehicle for Cho, who had been performing since her teens and had already won an American Comedy Award as the best female comedian of 1994. But shortly after she stepped on the celebrity fast-track, Cho discovered the network had some problems with the width of her face and her waist. She was put on a diet and exercise regimen that took off 30 pounds in two weeks.
Alcohol and diet pills quieted her hunger pangs and dulled the hurt of barbs thrown by a Korean community not satisfied with their TV spokesperson and by ABC for a show that was “too Asian,” then “not Asian enough.” It was canceled after one season.
On the surface, Cho was enjoying youth, stardom and the club scene, and dating the likes of Chris Isaak and Quentin Tarantino. But along with some extra recognition and extra cash, the TV series left her with a craving for self-destruction and permanent kidney damage from the unhealthy weight loss.
Once she found sobriety, Cho put her experiences into a performance and took it on the road. I’m The One That I Want dealt with everything from a mother’s persistent answering machine queries about her daughter’s sexual orientation to the consequences of peeing blood to the tricks of taking the stage when you’re too drunk to stand.
With the performance, she planted herself in a spot between stand-up and confessional monologue, taking her audience to that nasty place, swearing like a sailor in designer fashions and stealing laughs straight from the gut. I’m The One That I Want was made into a film that just came out on VHS and DVD, and Cho got deeper into her story, and more serious, in a book of the same name released earlier this year. In the meantime, she became a symbol of attainable beauty and feminist bravado, confirming for millions of women that sexy doesn’t always fit into size four.
It’s no wonder Cho admits over the phone to being a little tired, but overall, things are good for her at the moment. She’s in the midst of a two-week break from her current tour, The Notorious C.H.O., which concludes with a Carnegie Hall gig just after the new year. And she’s ready to move beyond her previous material, having achieved a kind of catharsis through it.
“I look back at my history and don’t really think too much about it,” Cho explained. “I feel like I’ve worked and I’ve written about it and it’s sort of left me.”
Her enthusiasm is now focused on the new tour. “It’s really wild,” she said. “It was written over the last year, and I wrote a lot of it in comedy clubs so it’s probably closer to stand-up than my other show.” For the title and a guiding sense of style, Cho has taken cues from hip-hop divas like Lil’ Kim, but won’t be bustin’ out rhymes of her own on stage. Music just moves her to her own form of creation.
“I just saw Björk on Monday and it was such a beautiful show,” she recalled. “I was weeping from beginning to end. It was this really fantastic experience. Here this artist who’s so incredibly different and unusual and gifted, I was just so moved by it, so I get a lot of inspiration from music.”
Cho is such a Björk fan that her Halloween costume last year was Selma from Dancer in the Dark (“I thought it was brilliant, but nobody got it”), but her tastes are fairly eclectic. She added, “In the last few weeks I’ve been able to see her and Marilyn Manson and Madonna, and all three affected me greatly. I get a lot of joy from that.”
In the manner of the hip-hop ladies whose CD covers always include a parental advisory sticker, Cho tackles with shocking, hilarious candor subjects that others in show business avoid. In her first performance, it was the ludicrous and damaging double-standard in the entertainment industry (chubby Cleveland native Drew Carey took her place in the ABC lineup); in The Notorious C.H.O., “It’s all about body politics and the body observed and the body inhabited,” she said.
“I think I just long for happiness and long for an ease and a gentleness of being, and that requires an attitude of self-acceptance,” Cho explained. “I think that that’s a really hard thing, because you kind of have to reject all the ideas you’re brought up with and all the ideas that have been impressed on us by television and the media in general.”
According to Cho, “The big thing this show is based on is the question, ‘What if this is it? What if this is just what I look like?’ If there’s nothing I can do about it, well, what does my opinion have to do with my happiness then? Can I just accept myself if I can’t do anything about it and be happy? That’s the big question that I want to pose to the audience, and pose to myself also.”
The idea came from the universal reaction women have to seeing themselves in photographs. “I go on these vacations, weird tours all over the world with people, and one of the weird commonalities I notice is that when looking at photographs, all the women always whine about how bad they look or how fat they look.”
“I’m, of course, among that,” she continued. “I always do the same thing. But why are we always doing that? Why do I have to get all upset if this is what I look like? If this is it, then happiness is my choice. Happiness doesn’t have to be a socially sanctioned idea of what women should look like. It’s just placing your happiness under your own control, which I think is a pretty revolutionary idea, although it shouldn’t be. It should be very simple and straightforward.”
This topic strikes a chord with the most visible and vocal contingent of the comic’s fan base, the gay community. Growing up on Haight Street in San Francisco, Cho said, “I was fortunate enough to have so many wonderful influences – older people who I hung out with when I was a kid, older gay men who really taught me a lot about the world and about the way I should live.”
The connection gay audiences feel with her “makes sense to what my life is. I have a great many gay friends. It’s something that I’ve always had so that’s the perspective I take a lot of the time.”
“Since I talk about my experience, too, when I draw a great gay audience, it’s really like I’m speaking about their lives as much as I’m speaking about mine,” she continued. “There’s a need for that, and a desire for them to hear about their own experience, so it’s exciting.”
The closest companion in Cho’s “sexually explicit, emotionally explicit” style is Richard Pryor, one of her strong comic influences. “I really loved him,” she said, “and it’s all because he talked about his experiences within show business and within all of the drama that was self-created – all of his tumultuous marriages and his relationships. And he was very honest about it, so it was comedy but it was also incredible writing and incredible storytelling. That’s what I would like to do, take that kind of storytelling where it’s not just humor, it’s humanism.”
Like Pryor, Cho hopes to leave a legacy of stand-up comedy movies. The Notorious C.H.O. will be filmed on the Seattle stop of the tour. Plans are to have it in theaters in the last half of 2002, about the same time her next book will come out.
Margaret Cho brings The Notorious C.H.O. to Mershon Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 8. Call 431-3600 for ticket info.