“I work through it before I bring it to the stage generally, so I don’t really have a problem with it,” says Cho, 32. “I think that the more personal you get, the more connection you can have with an audience. 

“That’s my main desire is connection and a kind of intimacy between me and this audience who’s come to see me. I feel this responsibility to them to really be true and be authentic. That’s why I do get so honest and that’s why I’m so raw sometimes. It’s not painful for me. It’s just part of my process—part of my writing process, part of my living process.” 

“I’m the One That I Want,” which opens today at Downtown West, was filmed in Cho’s hometown of San Francisco during the final two performances of her 1999 tour. The comedian originated the show off-Broadway and took it to 40 cities; the movie is letting her act be seen in dozens more. 

The first part of the film, with Cho talking candidly about being friends with gay men, dabbling in lesbianism and watching porn, seems tailor-made for the San Francisco crowd, but the Korean-American comedian says the same material played everywhere. 

“It would change slightly, but the spirit and elements of the show remained the same,” she says. 

Rather than sign on to do a comedy special for a cable network, Cho became determined to capture her show as a movie so that her message wouldn’t be edited. 

“Since I financed and produced the film myself, I didn’t have to edit anything out,” she says by phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I always wanted to do a standup comedy film, much like Richard Pryor’s films in the ‘70s. That was what I really wanted to accomplish. So it just was the right time.” 

Timing is everything to a comedian. Cho thought her time had come in 1994, when ABC hired her to be television’s first Asian-American sitcom lead. “All-American Girl,” supposedly based on Cho’s youth-pleasing standup act, quickly turned into a homogenized mess. 

Cho was told that her face was too Asian for television and that she needed to lose weight to conform to the Hollywood standards for female body types. Then she was told that she wasn’t Asian enough, and an Asian consultant was brought in to make her character more ethnic. 

Cho, then in her early 20s, went on a crash program of diet and exercise and lost 30 pounds in two weeks. Kidney failure, dangerous diet pills and the show’s cancellation resulted. 

“In Hollywood we have such a distorted vision of women and the way that women should look,” she says. “Not even being Caucasian, I never fit into that role anyway.” 

While she may not be the stick figure that some of today’s television stars are, Cho describes herself as “pretty small compared to other people just generally.” But women who fall anywhere between Cho’s size and the size of “The Practice” star Camryn Manheim come in for criticism. 

“I think Camryn Manheim’s very normal sized,” says Cho. “She’s wonderful and what she does is great, on top of her acting, which I think is phenomenal. But the fact that she has to be an activist as well is really this great statement on what Hollywood is all about ... . What guys have to stand in a space of activism in order to be overweight on camera? There aren’t any because they don’t have to justify their existence. Overweight actor guys are the lovable schlubs and leading men of Hollywood, and nobody questions that. But with women, it’s a whole different ball game. The way that we view women as opposed to the way we view men, there’s a great discrepancy, and it’s wrong.” 

It’s also wrong, she says, that since her show was canceled, networks have made zero progress in representing Asian Americans on television. 

“It’s got to change,” she says. “It’s gonna change. It will change.” 

She’s thrilled that one of the biggest hits at movie theaters currently is Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which boasts a Chinese cast. 

“It’s a great film, and I’m so pleased that it’s doing so well,” she says. “Yet it’s not Asian American; it’s Asian Asian ... I would also love to see Asian-American cinema as popular. I would love to see Asian-American actors doing stuff as well. It’s a different sensibility.” 

Although it’s almost possible to count every working Asian-American actor on one hand, Cho says she doesn’t spend a lot of energy meeting and discussing the problem with her peers. 

“What I do is my form of protest,” she says. “It’s just continuing to do shows and write and perform and to make films. That’s how I deal with that discussion.” 

Someday she may even return to television. 

“I’d like to—I don’t know exactly in what capacity,” says Cho, who shot a cameo on the Nickelodeon series “The Brothers Garcia” this week. “I do know a lot about television. I do know a lot about entertainment. And I know a lot about what makes people laugh. I think that I would be a very valuable asset to television. 

“There are shows that I love that I would love to be on like ‘Queer as Folk’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ I think there’s great things happening in television. I certainly do plan on going back; it just has to be the right thing.”