| Celebrity has not
been kind to Margaret Cho. After years of struggling in relative obscurity
on the stand-up circuit, the Korean-American performer finally landed the
Holy Grail of comedy – her own sitcom on a national network – only to find
it to be a poisoned chalice. A quick cancellation was the least of her
problems. The emotional and physical fallout from her sideswipe with megacelebrity
was far more damaging, as she relates in “I’m the One That I Want,” a frank
and brutally funny recounting of her bruising 15 minutes of TV stardom.
Cho begins her show with a few welcoming minutes of standard stand-up geared to her large – gay following. Suffice it to say that if you can’t appreciate a good Elsa Klensch joke or a Karl Lagerfeld impersonation, you may feel distinctly alienated. Cho’s show is often defiantly gay-centric (She happily labels herself a “fag hag”): Her wounding experience as TV’s “All-American Girl” (grisly title, that) seems to have left her with a pleasing pride in her distinctive identity and an enriched sympathy with the niche mentality of the more insular segments of the gay community. (Her show might just as well have been called “I Am What I Am.”) But most of the evening is given over to a tale of more universal interest, albeit an often painful one. “Once upon a time, I had my own TV show,” she begins, though what follows is grimmer than anything the brothers Grimm might have envisioned. The elation of landing a starring role in the ABC sitcom pales quickly when the network insists she go on a crash diet. “The network has a problem with the fullness of your face” is how her ruthless manager not-so-gently put it. Cho’s sitcom saga is full of grotesque ironies that could only happen in Hollywood, where the building of half-hour comedies takes place in an environment of humorlessness and desperation more likely to be associated with bloody war campaigns. Thus even as the network worries about the “fullness” of her face (which is a perfectly pretty Asian one), they hire a special Korean consultant for the show to throw the PC police off the scent. This helpful woman’s biggest brainstorm: “Use chopsticks.” With tabloids suddenly decrying her “thunder thighs,” Cho promptly loses 30 pounds in two weeks, collapsing on the set with kidney failure. But weight isn’t all she loses; Cho movingly reveals that in her desire to turn herself into the pretty, pliant and sufficiently thin star the network insisted on, her own sense of self gradually slipped away. When the highly paid mirage that had supplanted her real persona is erased by the abrupt cancellation of the show, what was left was a void that Cho filled with alcohol. For all the gruesome revelations (and there are plenty), Cho’s show never trades in self-pity. Although the dehumanizing treatment of her Hollywood handlers is tartly mocked, she’s always hardest on herself, recounting with a sometimes almost unpleasant frankness her dependence on drugs and sex. (The show is NC-17-going-on-debauched.) And she brings a lacerating humor to bear on even the ugliest episodes. After waking up after a rock-bottom binge, she looks around and cracks: “What kind of ‘Motley Crue Behind the Scenes’ bullshit is this?” Cho tends to belabor the show’s coarsest passages, an indulgence encouraged by the audience. It’s also a pity that the evening leans more toward straight stand-up than the more rigorous and artful show it could be. It’s most affecting, and often funniest, when Cho is commenting on the contradictions in the culture that her saga exposes: how it inculcates dueling desires to be an “All-American Girl” who doesn’t feel an alien in a blond, white world and an exemplar of racial integrity, the ultra-Asian-American. By exposing the humorous sides of both impulses, Cho ultimately triumphs over the harrowing toll this tug of war took on her own psyche. |