Cho's hundred minutes is the perfect sort of entertainment for those who wallow in "Entertainment Tonight" and the National Enquirer, and believe that bathing with celebrities' dirty laundry cleanses so much better than an ordinary shower.

It's just a good thing for the rest of us the San Francisco comic is so doggone funny. She was swinging for the fences during the first of two shows Saturday night at the Warfield Theatre, and for the most part, was as funny as she's ever been as she played for the wildly enthusiastic hometown crowd.

She made no bones about being thrilled to be playing the Warfield -- the perfect spot for a triumphant homecoming, and the location she chose to film her show.

Cho, in many ways, has traveled a considerable distance from the teen comedian who created a wonderful routine out of the linguistic adventures of her Korean mother. Mom bits are still a big part of the act, and hugely funny, peppered throughout the evening, to give a sort of home base to the story of a life wildly out of control.

But Cho has much more to talk about -- her failed sitcom, "All American Girl," which sent her into a personal tailspin of alcohol and drugs after its cancellation in 1995, and her ambiguous sexual identity, which began bothering her after a brief shipboard fling while she was booked as the comic on a lesbian cruise to Alaska.

"I kept wondering," she says, "'Am I gay, am I straight? No, I'm slutty.'"

Cho takes a wide-ranging approach to her comedy, and seems to skewer those in her path fairly equally. She does it so well that her show, fresh from a very successful off-Broadway run, plays much like an incredibly blue, long-form stand-up comedy performance.

But it is not the comedy that makes the show theatrical (not to mention compelling and repelling at the same time). It is the story of the young Korean comic who never felt any acceptance, anywhere -- not at home, not at school, not from other comedians -- getting a call from the president of Disney saying her show was going to be a series.

She called her mother with the news on Mother's Day and Mom proclaimed it the best Mother's Day ever, "'No, second best,'" Cho says, adopting her mother's thick Korean accent. The first was her first Mother's Day, just months after Margaret was born -- a funny and touching bit, showing Cho as an absolute master of the form.

The happiness was not long-lived. Cho and her series were beset with trouble from the start. On a personal level, she was too heavy; not Asian enough; a disgrace to Asians everywhere; and, within six months, just another stand-up comic with a failed sitcom on her resume. She also had undergone collapsed kidneys from losing 30 pounds in two weeks; was molested by a producer interested in filming her script, as long as she slept with him; and became addicted to diet pills.

That addiction led to more addictions -- drugs and booze. And she'd pretty much made up her mind to die, but she didn't have the courage to actually do herself in.

The tale is told with some bitterness, and a frightening candor that is remarkable, and then disturbing, because the tale of abject desperation is interspersed frequently with hilarious material. And all that is punctuated by declarations around the notion of never again being destroyed by trying to live up to someone else's images, or never allowing yourself to be manipulated into a position that isn't you.

It is there the show takes on the feeling of a tent revival, and Cho's act becomes cloying and calculated to elicit the foot-stomping and wild cheers of the crowd (which plays right along with the same sort of enthusiasm as a Jerry Springer audience).

That aside, though, Cho's piece is stunning theater, performed through pain by someone who has paid more than a fair share of dues.