COMEDIENNE MARGARET CHO DISCUSSES HER UNIQUE VIEW ON LIFE.
Story by Melissa Giannini
 

“Once I had sex with a woman and I went through this whole thing, like, ‘Am I gay? Am I straight?’ And I realized, I’m just slutty. Where’s my parade? What about slut pride?” So sets the tone for Margaret Cho’s new comedy concert tour, I’m The One That I Want, a show that rehashes what she went through as a part of the first sitcom to depict an Asian-American family (All American Girl), its cancellation and the resulting four-year depression that she went through. “It’s about learning about fame and what it means and how not fitting into the system was hard for me, and how I learned that not fitting in is a good thing,” she explains. “The show’s about coping with these painful experiences through humor and how I dealt with everything. It’s totally autobiographical and it’s a stand-up comedy show, but there is a narrative. There’s a story that happens.” The show started in New York at the Westbeth Theater off-Broadway for four months. “It’s been pretty intense,” Cho said. “The tour schedule has been very remarkable. Last week I was in Cleveland, Denver, Phoenix, New York and Atlanta. It’s like a concert tour, one night in every venue.” Don’t be watching for the Margaret Cho tour bus to roll into town, however. “It’s just me and my manager, so we’ve been flying,” she said. “We’re like nuns. We just go from city to city and it’s pretty simple, because there’s no set or instruments or anything.” Cho started performing stand-up when she was 16 in a comedy club called The Rose & Thistle above a bookstore her parents ran in San Francisco. Soon after, she won a contest to open for Jerry Seinfeld. She says her childhood helped shape her future career. “I was always weird,” she says. “I don’t know exactly… I was just a weird kid. I was very out of place everywhere and I just seemed really strange. I had friends kind of, but mostly I was really ostracized because I was so bizarre and I never fit in anywhere. That was really painful for me. I spent a lot of time trying to make myself really charming and really affable and somebody that was fun to be with. As I tried to perfect this persona, I wound up being really good at performing and I started doing stand-up when I was 16.” Her dad writes joke books for the public, but she says that her sense of humor and her dad’s don’t always match up. “He writes joke books, but he’s really humorless,” she says. “He’s a scholar. The joke books that he writes are for speakers, so they’re very dry and boring. He mostly collects [the jokes] from other sources.” After a few years on the college circuit, she moved into television, to star in her must anticipated, much criticized and short-lived television series in the mid-‘90s. Even though the show may have been ahead of its time, today’s TV climate is even less diverse, she says. “I think that television just does not reflect real life. My show attempted to, but even that was a failed attempt because it didn’t really capture who I was as a performer or as a person and there was incredible backlash attached to that because we were so not used to seeing Asian faces on television that so much attention was paid to it and it was overly scrutinized. She does admit to being a fan of one modern show, however. “I watch Eastenders, which is a British television show on PBS here. It’s a soap opera and it’s incredible because it has people of all ages, all races, all genders, all sexualities and it’s really popular. That’s the only thing I think is watchable and it’s from another country on the other side of the world.” If she were to head back to television, it would be on different terms, she says. “I know that I want to approach it and I know that it is in my future, but I don’t know exactly what it would be. I think that I would do a talk show or some sort of a variety show as opposed to a sitcom. I really love sketch comedy. I love reality-based television and talk shows. That’s really exciting to me.” Her comedy shows are famous for their appeal to wide audiences, especially gay audiences. “I’ve always had a connection to gay men,” she says. “Ever since I was a kid. A wonderful place to be in life is to have the company of many gay men and that’s something I’ve always had and something I’ve always treasured. It makes sense to me that that’s what my audience is because that’s what my audience in life is.” The amazing thing about her show is that with it’s dark subject matter of failure and depression, it’s still comedy. “It’s all about the awful stuff, but it’s about taking all of that and turning it around and learning how to deal with painful circumstance and really thriving under that,” she says. “I do draw a lot from the difficulties in my life.” MARGARET CHO. State Theatre -- November 20.