by Patrick MacDonald  Seattle Times staff critic 

Margaret Cho holds nothing back. 

By the end of her 90-minute stand-up comedy routine, you know all about her family, her sex life, her drug-use, her alcoholism, her triumphs, her failures and her dog. 

You learn that her grandfather helped raise her when her dad was deported back to Korea, that she never graduated from high school, that she was subjected to racism and ridicule in her life and career. You hear how and why she lost her prime-time sitcom on ABC, “All-American Girl.” 

There are lots of laughs along the way, but ultimately it’s a story of survival. Several times the capacity audience burst into cheers and applause as she told of achieving victory over adversities. 

Cho said she nearly died of alcoholism and drug-abuse when she fell into depression after her TV show was canceled. After a 36-hour binge, she woke up in a wet bed with a guy she didn’t know, and right then she turned her life around. 

The clean and sober Cho is a better person and a better comedian. She’s much more physical on stage, rather than just standing and talking at the microphone (she said she used to have to hold on to the microphone stand to keep the room from spinning). She creates a host of characters, male and female, that are finely delineated. 

Casual in a white, half-sleeve, ruffled blouse, tight blue jeans, big platform shoes and a red scarf whose tasseled ends nearly touched the floor, Cho first acknowledged her core audience, gay men (the show was presented by the predominantly gay Seattle Men’s Chorus). 

Growing up in San Francisco’s gay ghetto, where her family owned a bookstore, she befriended gays. She was a prom date, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to bar hop with (although she usually went home alone). “The last call at a gay bar,” she said, “the only ones left in there are women.” 

She had sex with a lesbian while working as a comedian on an all-women cruise. The affair confused her. “Am I gay? Am I straight?,” she said. “Then I realized I was just slutty.” Pause. “Where’s MY parade?”

Raw humor like that was cut out of her sitcom, along with most of her comedic personality. The producers complained of a “fullness” in her face. A crash diet sent her to the hospital with kidney failure. Nevertheless, the show initially gave her a feeling of acceptance before it was suddenly canceled and her world fell apart. “All-American Girl” was replaced by “The Drew Carey Show” because, she deadpanned, “He’s so skinny.” 

Cho balanced cold, hard reality with laugh-out-loud hilarity so skillfully that you didn’t know whether the tears in your eyes were from laughing or crying - or both.