A new Cho show on film
Comedian pushes the limits on family, sex

Terry Lawson, August 21, 2002

It’s almost disappointing when you hook up with Margaret Cho, whose concert films are the most hilarious, most revealing and raunchiest examples of the art since the retirement of Richard Pryor. Cho, 33, is exceedingly polite, which is the problem – where’s that nasty Korean-American girl? Her most recent show, “The Notorious C.H.O.,” sees Cho “stealing the imagery of the hip-hop girls, who I just love, and copping their attitude.” The show was a remarkable success; she toured with it for nearly a year, culminating with a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall. The film version opens in metro Detroit Friday. The next show, she hopes, will follow the path of Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe,” with her honing the material in out-of-town tryouts before moving to Broadway. Then she’d tour the show in various cities and release it as a film. “It’s a good way to work,” says Cho, “because you’re able to make adjustments and discover what connects and what doesn’t before settling in, so to speak. But it is a show, and once it’s finished, I stay close to the script. It will change in small ways night to night, but mostly in feeling, not in content.” Cho has been performing comedy for more than half her life, having made her debut at 16 in a comedy club above the San Francisco bookstore owned by her parents. “I knew from a very early age I wanted to be a stand-up comic,” says Cho. “I never, ever dreamed of getting married and having children like the other girls. I just wanted to perform. And I had a very clear vision of the kind of comedy I wanted to do.” Her biggest influence, then and now, she says, was Pryor, “who had this very clear vision, which was that he would dare to reveal who he was at every opportunity. He never hid behind jokes. Even when he did characters, they were obviously real people. It was that honesty I always aspired to.” When she was still a teenager, Cho won a comedy contest in which the first prize was an opening slot on the Jerry Seinfeld tour. By her early 20s, she was one of the top draws on the comedy-club circuit, where her Korean-American heritage and her relationship with her very traditional parents became a cornerstone of her act. This was the ‘90s, when it seemed every stand-up was being offered a sitcom. Cho, having been embraced by everyone from Roseanne to Bob Hope, was tapped to star in “All-American Girl,” in which she would play a young, single, Asian-American not unlike herself. Though ABC had seemed excited about the idea of an ethnic show, the network soon wanted the show retooled, to be less ethnic, and Cho’s humor toned down. Moreover, there was the suggestion that she should lose weight, to more closely resemble a traditional perky female sitcom star. Caught between good intentions and half-hearted execution, the show was canceled. Instead of taking to her futon, Cho used her notoriety to get a few film roles, including one in John Woo’s “Face/Off,” and then turned her experiences into a confessional show called “I’m the One That I Want,” in which she talked honestly about being a full-figured Asian-American girl who drank too much in a town full of skinny white people who sipped Evian. “It’s hard to be honest and vulnerable on stage,” says Cho, “but what Pryor and Roseanne had taught me was that there was strength and integrity in it, and as audiences respond to strength and integrity as well as vulnerability, I began to feel a real connection with the audiences. It wasn’t like the performer on stage and the audience out there. It was like, ‘We’re all in this room together, and I bet some of my stuff is your stuff too.’ “ “I’m the One That I Want” was an off-Broadway hit, and Cho took it on the road to ecstatic reviews. The show became the text for a best-selling book of the same title, and the San Francisco concert stop was filmed for a movie that went on to become a best-selling video and DVD. But even before “I’m the One That I Want” was in theaters, Cho was moving on. Having had relationships with men – most publicly director Quentin Tarantino – and with women, she was writing material that dealt with her sexual explorations. “It was what was most interesting to me at that time,” says Cho of the experiences recounted in “The Notorious C.H.O.” When my friends and I got together, it’s what we talked most about. It wasn’t so much about romance, although that occasionally entered into it, obviously. It was about this feeling that something was off, that I must be doing it wrong. And it was about what we really wanted to try, the limits that we wanted to push – or, actually, already had and just hadn’t admitted it to each other.” What began as random recollections and observations, she says, began to coalesce into a kind of “weird sexual odyssey” that detailed her experimentation with bondage and her visits to S&M clubs, not to mention some practices that will make even adventurous viewers wince. Admitting all this seems as brave as it is audacious, but the film raises the stakes further by putting Cho’s father and mother, of whom her daughter does a devastating impersonation, in the audience. According to Cho, the show probably makes the rest of the audience more uncomfortable than her parents. “They know what they’re getting into,” says Cho. “They know and respect who I am, even if it occasionally confuses them. And they know I love them.” Cho says she has no unifying theme yet for the show she’s currently writing, just some “broad ideas.” Yet she claims to have no anxiety about whether it will eventually come together, “because it always does, and because I’ve found that, as unique as I think I might be, there’s a whole lot of people out there, gay and straight, men and women, Asian and Caucasian, who seem to be dealing with the same things I deal with every day and finding them just as funny and ridiculous. “The weird thing is, the more honest I got with my comedy, the more inclusive I became. I have a lot of friends out there I’ve never met, so I gotta get busy.”