The line gets a well-deserved eruption of applause from what appears to be a largely gay and lesbian crowd, and it sets the tone nicely (if that’s the word) for the following hour-and-a-half.

A rubber-faced Korean-American bisexual with unapologetically oversized physical appetites and very little tolerance for middle-American stupidity, Cho is something of an inspirational figure to the armies of the resentfully disenfranchised.

With her combination of gender, ethnicity, body type and sexual proclivities, she manages to speak for just about everyone who has felt shut out or persecuted by the dominant culture of processed white-bread idiocy.

Typical is her description of would happen if straight men had periods: “Every bachelor apartment would look like a murder scene.”

Or why gay men should be permitted to be married: “We need to recognize that a government that would deny a gay man the right to bridal registry is a fascist state.”

With an anger recalling Richard Pryor, a knack for the profane that evokes George Carlin and a dead eye for hypocrisy that suggests Chris Rock, Cho - whose previous stand-up movie was called I’m the One That I Want - is unquestionably one of the more dynamic and fearless stand-up presences around.

Next to Cho, Janeane Garofalo, another unimpressed short-girl observer of the overbimboed mainstream, looks like Carol Burnett.

But for all her contempt of the too-beautiful, the too-straight, the too-white and the too-stupid, Cho is equally merciless on the subject her own appetites.

She talks about past eating disorders and sexual experiences with graphic frankness, and she revels in her own hungry humanity: “I like to get ugly when I f – k.”

Shot simply with a couple of digital video cameras, Notorious C.H.O. is, like the performer in her untucked checked shirt, jeans and platform shoes, straight-up, dead-on and unembellished.

And that’s unquestionably part of her outsider allure. If you really want declare war on the culture of brainless glam, you have to get a bit smart and ugly.

In this war, Cho is truly doing her bit.