At
33, Margaret Cho has been doing stand-up for more than half her life. While
some people remember her from her starring turn in the ill-fated All-American
Girl sitcom in 1994, many more know her as the “Korean-American fag-hag,
shi*-starter, girl comic, trash talker” she describes herself as in her
phenomenally successful one-woman show, I’m The One That I Want. Intelligent,
observant, articulate and unfailingly frank, Margaret has been described
as akin to Lenny Bruce, but her latest tour and the resulting film, Notorious
C.H.O., is as much a tribute to the outspoken women of Rap, especially
Li’l Kim and Missy Elliott, whom Margaret acknowledges as influences.
Margaret began performing stand-up at 16 at The Rose & Thistle comedy club above her parents’ San Francisco bookstore. She won the opportunity to open for Jerry Seinfeld, appeared on talk shows and a Bob Hope special, became the most booked act on the college circuit and, in 1994, won the American Comedy Award for Female Comedian. Her short-lived All-American Girl series, while a heartbreaking disaster at the time, proved to be rich fodder for I’m The One That I Want.
Many peoples’ favorite bits are Margaret’s dead-on impersonations of her mother (“Pick up da phone. If you don’t pick up da phone, dat mean you gay. Only gay screen calls.”), whom Margaret clearly adores and calls “magical.” Both of her parents are featured in Notorious C.H.O. “They were just beside themselves,” she says. “They loved the film so much and they were so excited about being in it. Now I think they’re just really interested in furthering their careers. They’ve both expressed a desire to get representation,” she laughs.
Margaret is grateful she inherited from her parents “a love for knowledge and a kind of nonjudgment about art. And this desire to consume all that is beautiful, which is something they both have.” What she feels she could have done without is “my father’s critical eye and my mother’s eating disorder,” the latter of which provides some bittersweet humor in Notorious C.H.O.
Margaret differentiates Notorious C.H.O. from ITOTIW as more of a stand-up act than a one-woman show, though the themes are similar. “In a sense, I’m saying the same thing. That just feeling good about ourselves is a choice, and it can be really easy for that choice to be made. But I think it’s told in a slightly different way. I also think it’s funnier.”
Margaret tried out some of her material in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she appeared at the Fringe Festival. Her friend, John Cameron Mitchell, was also there premiering his film Hedwig and The Angy Inch and performing live with the cast of Hedwig.
“There is a gay bar in Edinburgh that I mention in the show, called CC Bloom’s. It’s named after Bette Midler’s character in Beaches - it’s a real place and, I mean, it’s just the gayest thing that you can name something. So I was hanging out with John and the cast there and one of the guys at the bar stole a bag of ours and started giving away the stuff in the bag,” Margaret recalls. “It was this really crazy thing and so John and everybody got into this huge brawl. They were throwing chairs and fighting. It was so scary because it made me realize that when gay men are in a fight, they will fight to the death, because they’re fighting every fight they didn’t get to fight. The police came and everybody was bloody,” Margaret laughs. “It looked like a special Gay Pride edition of Cops.”
In
Scotland, “they were very shocked by what I was doing. The way that women
in comedy are viewed there is very different from here. It’s quite rare
to see a woman performing on her own. There’s very little about one person,
one woman, talking very frankly about her life.”
It’s the women of SCTV who were Margaret’s strongest role models growing up. “I think I would have died if I didn’t have SCTV. It just really did it for me, even more so than Saturday Night Live because there were so many women that were important – Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Robin Duke. I also love Eugene Levy and Christopher Guest. Their movies, Best In Show and Waiting for Guffman, are so funny.” Margaret can see herself following in the footsteps of Guest and Woody Allen, creating her own acting troupe and film genre. “That’s something that I would really enjoy and is definitely in the future.”
Gentle and thoughtful, the personal Margaret is a far cry from her outspoken, sexually graphic stage persona. “People do come in with preconceived notions about me, and that makes sense because I come across as that’s who I am when I’m performing. And that is me but I’m not that funny all the time,” she laughs. “And I’m not that brash all the time. I’m pretty soft-spoken, I think...”
Celebrities have flocked to Margaret’s new show, but Margaret’s rarely been aware of their presence until afterwards. “People tell me later who was there, like Christina Ricci and Claire Danes. I don’t have parties after the show so I never see anyone. I have to keep traveling so I don’t have the luxury of doing that. But I’m kind of reclusive anyway,” she admits, “so it’s a release to me that I don’t have to do that. I enjoy a party in my home and I enjoy attending them, but I don’t particularly like them when they’re for me, like after a performance, because it’s like I have to keep performing. It makes me feel really self-conscious and stupid.”
Margaret recently bought
a house in Glendale, the city her cousins lived in when she was growing
up and which she visited often on summer vacations. In her autobiography,
I’m The One That I Want, a national bestseller, she describes the Glendale
of her childhood as “a magical place,” and still considers it so, citing
the Glendale Galleria as a favorite mecca.
Besides being an avid
shopper, Margaret is a voracious reader.
“I think it was always a part of my nature,” Margaret says. “Even before my parents bought the bookstore. My favorite day was a rainy Saturday, which happens often in San Francisco, and I would get to go to the library. I would go at ten in the morning and be there all day. Or I would check out a huge stack of books and I would just sit in my window and read all day.”
“I was so interested in everything. I still have the same attitude. I enjoy reading weird medical texts on foot diseases or diseases of the eye and crime scenes and forensics. Then I’ll enjoy a flowery romance, like Madison County. The whole range. It’s the same with movies and music. I think my favorite period is French New Wave and all the great movies from that era. But I could be just as satisfied watching Freddie Got Fingered over and over again,” she laughs.
Margaret’s given name is Moran, the Korean name for a pretty, resilient flower. When she and her family talked about her having a name that was translatable to English, her father favored Maggie. “He had sort of a love affair with this song, an Irish song, something about Maggie,” Margaret recalls. “And I liked it because of the book, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. I love Judy Blume.”
The film version of Notorious C.H.O. begins a two-week run at The Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles June 28. The CD, taped live at Carnegie Hall, is now available in stores or can be purchased at www.margaretcho.com.