She’s the one

Comedian Margaret Cho turns struggles into stories for her one-woman show
March 4, 2000

By Kendall Morgan / The Dallas Morning News
 

Anyone who’s caught Margaret Cho’s act knows the feisty comedian takes a no-holds-barred approach to making her audience laugh.  She offers up the most personal anecdotes—on dating, drinking and her relationship with her parents—and turns less-than-impressive parts of her life into fodder for some of the most humorous musings on the comedy circuit.  But the bawdy girl who hits the stage with her one-woman show in Dallas on Saturday seems a far cry from the subdued one in a recent phone interview from her Los Angeles home.  The stage Margaret Cho spouts take-no-prisoners pickup lines and questions her own sexuality for laughs: “Am I gay? Am I straight? Then I thought, ‘I’m just slutty! Where’s my parade!’” The Margaret Cho on the phone seems a different woman—full of positivity, lacking in sarcasm or profanity.  The 31-year-old comedian has gone through some tough times—the most public being the cancellation of her 1994 ABC sitcom, All-American Girl. But having come through the hell and high water of drinking, drugs and professional setbacks, she now seems happy, calm and secure.  Ms. Cho says she just decided one day to finally stop her self-destructive behavior.  “I was just done - I felt like I could go either way, I could die—really, it was that bad—or completely turn around and feel better. Really, it was very easy deciding once I made it clear to myself there was no looking back. I’m really lucky. I was just struck with this brightness, this light, and I just followed it.”  She began taking elements of that dark period to form anecdotes that make up parts of I’m the One That I Want, the one-woman show she’s performing at the Majestic Theatre Saturday night.  I’m the One starts with anecdotes familiar to the Margaret Cho fan: her affectionate send-up of her mother’s reaction to her wild-girl American ways. Then she takes a detour to discuss her sitcom and its fallout.  The genesis of the stage show, a hit in New York last summer, was Ms. Cho’s experiences in show business and her journey to a accept herself and her talent. The title came from a more unusual place.  “The underlying theme is I wanted something that was self-reliant and self-loving. There’s this Sinead O’Connor album called I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, then there’s a country love song, ‘I’m the One That You Want,’ then there’s the Grease song ‘You’re the One That I Want.’ I saw a card at the dry cleaner one day that said, ‘We’re the one that you want.’ I thought it was such a great thing—it was so strong to me.”  Elements of I’m the One were derived from bits she was already doing in her stand-up act. “[The show] . . . had in a lot of ways been written already,” she says. “Putting it together was an easy thing to do, and one of the things that helped me want to do it is my personality changed a lot. I went through a lot of life changes and looked at myself. I started being comfortable with my body physically and stopped dieting. Women in our culture are encouraged to maintain this thin body.”  Ms. Cho’s weight worries started when she was plucked from relative obscurity at age 24 to start work on All-American Girl, a sitcom focusing on the culture clash between Americanized “Margaret Kim” and her traditional Korean family.  The San Francisco native already was a success on the college comedy circuit and was getting encouragement from Jerry Seinfeld.  But for a comedian to have her own sitcom is a Tinseltown dream come true. That is, until the Hollywood myth-making machine tells the starlet: “We love you; now change.”  Criticized for the fullness of her face, she lost 30 pounds in a month and ended up with kidney failure. “Doing the television show, I lost an incredibly large amount of weight in a small time and got all these harsh criticisms that affected me for years. Weight issues are such a part of [America’s] culture. It really is a big deal how we feel about ourselves.”  She makes light of this in a story about network officials holding a meeting because they felt “it would be a really good idea if you lost 10 pounds before we started shooting.” Ms. Cho quips: “Now, the fact that they said that is fine, but just the idea that these people had a meeting to discuss my big, fat ass!”  Despite her efforts to conform to the network’s physical criteria, the show still drew criticism—from some because it was “too ethnic,” from others because it wasn’t “ethnic enough.”  Japanese actors in the cast drew flak for their portrayal of Koreans, and a consultant was called on-set to tell Korean-American Cho how to be more “authentic.”  Ms. Cho’s current manager and business partner, Karen Taussig (who is co-producing the film version of I’m the One),was involved with All-American Girl. “I did the deal for the sitcom and then got fired because I was supposedly uncooperative and refused to tell Margaret to lose weight,” says Ms. Taussig. “She’s the one that fired me. Then she went through a four-year period where she almost killed herself, then called me and said, ‘You were absolutely right.’ “  Ms. Cho took her career, and life, into her own hands by creating I’m the One. Already getting positive reviews from across the country, the show has been recorded for a CD, inspired a book and is being prepared for the big screen.  Ms. Cho’s U.S. tour of the show will end in June after a year’s run. The comedian says I’m the One has evolved since she began performing it off-Broadway.  “The material was the same, but the energy was a lot more contained and it was in a smaller space. Now it’s like a rock show - I feel like Britney Spears. I’m playing these huge venues, and it’s become very eclectic and grown over time. The same people tend to come see me year after year . . . so I get to know my audience.”  Her audience, she says, helped her through the hard times, and Ms. Cho wants to give something back by focusing I’m the One on some of the problems she sees in Los Angeles and the culture at large. Just witness the progressive thinning of Hollywood, where actresses start out at a normal weight and hit superstardom as the pounds drop off.  “The show is a funny show, but in a lot of ways people are looking at it more than entertainment because these issues are really, really important,” she says.  “Our culture is so loaded with images of how to get the right body to get the right man. It’s about being the perfect thing, but you have to go get it. What if we decided the best beauty secret we can have is self-love. We can just be beautiful by deciding to be. That’s such a revolutionary idea, and once we get it, we’ll have so much power.”  It’s clear Margaret Cho has realized her power—she’s even willing to take on television again.  “When I’m done with my tour and my book and my movie, that’s the next thing I’m focusing on. I’ll have complete control, and since I’ve been around, I’m so solid in my television knowledge,” she says. “It probably won’t be a sitcom. It’ll probably be a talk show like Arsenio used to be. That’s my next goal.”  Ms. Taussig believes the sky’s the limit for the young actress-comedian. “I’ve worked with a lot of other comedians, and Margaret’s so good. Margaret’s too good - it isn’t by coincidence that there’s few female comedians out there. My goal in producing the film is so more people can see her. She’ll go down in history as one of the greatest comedians and performers,” she says, drawing comparisons to Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce.  Having settled for other people’s versions of success, Margaret Cho is ready for her own. “When the movie comes out, that will open up a lot of opportunities for me to do future film work in a lot of different ways, like producing and directing. I’m going to do it all!”  PERFORMANCE INFORMATION  I’m the One That I Want, at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Majestic Theatre, 1925 Elm. Tickets $28.75 to $38.75. Call Ticketmaster at 214-373-8000 or metro 972-647-5700.