By Dann McDorman

Margaret Cho is a walking bundle of contradictions. She is shy, sensitive, sharply intelligent. She is Korean American. She is bisexual (or maybe just slutty). She is raunchy, vulgar and rude. She is a recovering alcoholic. She is a failed sitcom star. She is, quite possibly, the funniest woman in America.

The Notorious CHO, described as the female Korean American version of Richard Pryor for her “raunchy and crude” humor. Photo courtesy of Margaret Cho

Cho’s resurgence began in 1999 with her I’m the One That I Want one-woman show, a huge hit that spawned a critically acclaimed concert film and a best-selling book. It continued this year with her raucous Notorious C.H.O. comedy tour, which features enough X-rated material to make Richard Pryor proud and give Jesse Helms a heart attack (although first he’d need someone to explain Cho’s vocabulary: fag hag, douche, dyke, etc.).

Cho is on top of the world now, but it’s been a long and decidedly unfunny climb back up. In 1995, amidst a blaze of poor ratings and public backlash, ABC cancelled her sitcom All-American Girl (the first network TV show to feature an Asian-American family). Almost immediately, Cho flew apart at the seams and descended into a blurry haze of self-loathing and substance abuse. “I was usually so drunk onstage I would have to hold the mike stand to keep the room from spinning,” Cho recalled in her memoir, published earlier this year. “Waking up with a hangover was a regular, normal thing.” She gained weight, drifted aimlessly through a serious of destructive relationships, and consumed a mind-boggling quantity of illegal drugs.

Inevitably, all the self-abuse began to cripple her performance.

Cho’s recovery began when she started to talk about her personal and professional problems in her stand-up routine. The new act was part-comedy, part-therapy session, and part social protest. Cho ranted against everything that had brutalized her in the past, from homophobia to society’s obsession with beauty to ABC’s ethnic stereotyping. Audiences responded enthusiastically to the new, confessional Cho. Clubs and theaters across the country began to sell out. Eventually the new material, packaged by Cho as the I’m the One that I Want tour, won New York magazine’s award for Performance of the Year and was named Great Performance of the Year by Entertainment Weekly. In an instant, after four years in the gutter, Cho was back and badder than ever. She does not intend to go away again.

The Notorious C.H.O.

Comedy, Woody Allen famously observed, is simply tragedy plus time. Embarrassing missteps from adolescence eventually become treasured anecdotes. Painful relationships are remembered as extended jokes. And national tragedies yield raucous punchlines.

At the Notorious show in New York City in October, Cho opened by somberly announcing that all the proceeds from the night would go to benefit the World Trade Center Foundation. “We’re all just trying to help out. Even me,” Cho concluded with a smile. “For the last month I’ve been down at Ground Zero giving blowjobs to construction workers.” Appropriate? That depends on the listener. But for the diehard Cho fans in the audience, the joke was perfect. It sliced through the tension and let everyone know that, at least for a little while, they could forget about Sept. 11.

Nothing, Cho knows as well as anybody, erases sadness and melancholy like a dirty joke. And as far as dirty jokes go, hers are the dirtiest around. Notorious is so deliciously dirty it should have a warning label. Cho uses the kind of language that can peel paint and make longshoremen blush. It’s this aspect of her routine that most mainstream critics and media outlets have seized upon. “And speaking of sex,” the uptight New York Times announced, “Ms. Cho is refreshingly, uproariously raunchy.” “Crude, rude, ribald...” proclaimed gossipy Variety. “She’s the best girlfriend whose brass always livens up the party.”

For her part, Cho is nonchalant about her X-rated reputation, which has established her as the female Korean American version of Richard Pryor (if you can imagine such a thing). “I don’t even think of it that way,” Cho said in a recent phone interview with AsianWeek. “To me, it’s just self-esteem and social activism mixed with really good dick jokes.” Such as? “Every dick is like a snowflake,” she observes in the Notorious show, “Totally unique.”

The Notorious show may be funnier and rauncher than I’m the One that I Want, but it’s also different in another way: It has largely abandoned the ethnic humor that comprised much of Cho’s earlier material. Just about the only ethnic-tinged laughs come when she lampoons the Korean accent of the clerk at a local video-porn store. (“Beaver Fever? You late with Beaver Fever? Come look at woman! She like Beaver Fever!”)

“That wasn’t a conscious choice,” Cho said. “It just reflects what I was thinking about when I wrote the show, who I was hanging out with. The next show will be much more about racial identity,” she promised. If so, it will be interesting to hear what she has to say.

Cho has always occupied an ambiguous position in the Asian American community. On one hand, she has suffered from all the prejudice and stereotyping minority populations are typically subjected to in the United States. On the other hand, as a self-professed “fag hag” with a potty mouth and an open sexual orientation, Cho doesn’t match the self-image that the mainstream Asian American community propagates, either. (“I’m sorry Korea has me to represent it,” she professed in her Drunk with Power comedy album.)

This disconnect has led to Cho getting sandbagged from both sides. Early in her career, Cho appeared on Star Search International, an Olympics-style talent contest. She was assigned to compete on behalf of Korea, instead of the United States, where she was born and raised. But that was just the beginning of the confusion. “Couldn’t you be more, oh, I don’t know, Chinese?” the show’s talent coordinator asked her. “I’m Korean,” Cho said. “Whatever,” was the response.

Years later, ABC executives ordered Cho to lose 30 pounds because they were concerned about “the fullness of her face.” Eventually, they even hired an “Asian consultant” to make Cho and the other actors more “authentic.”

The Asian American media was scarcely more understanding. Organizations like the Korean Media Action Group protested Cho’s depiction of the “average” Korean-American family. Asian American journalists wrote scathing editorials about All-American Girl’s negative impact. Critics piled on scorn and obloquy until they totally destroyed Cho’s appeal to the one constituency she thought she could rely upon. (The fact that the show was emphatically, uncharacteristically, not funny didn’t help much either.)

Cho doesn’t talk much about the backlash now, but in her memoir she bluntly summarized what she believed was the motivation behind the attacks. “They had never seen a Korean American role model like me before,” she wrote. “I didn’t play violin. I didn’t f*** Woody Allen.” No one has ever accused Ms. Cho of not speaking her mind.

Little Peony Flower

Margaret Cho was born in San Francisco in 1968. Her given name was Moran, which in Korean refers to a peony flower, a rugged little flower that blooms even in winter. It’s a pretty name, although the way it’s pronounced gave her loads of problems during childhood. “MORON!! YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A MORON!!!” other kids screamed.

Cho eventually began going by the less beautiful, but more adolescently secure, Margaret.

Cho grew up in her parents’ bookstore on Polk Street, which in the late ’70s was an epicenter (along with the Castro) of gay culture in San Francisco. Many of the clerks who worked at the store were gay, and she was profoundly influenced by their lifestyle and sensibilities as she grew up. “Homosexuality brought me back to men, made me see they could be trusted, and even loved,” wrote Cho in her memoir. “I’ve never stopped feeling this way.” From the very beginning of her career, Cho’s closest friends and most ardent supporters have always been gay. The majority of the audience at the New York City in October consisted of gays and lesbians — not Asian Americans. This empathy manifests itself in Cho’s material as well as in her activism: She has marched in several Gay Pride parades and contributed proceeds from her Drunk with Power album to the Montrose AIDS clinic in Houston.

The Bug

Cho got the comedy bug when she began attending the School of the Arts in San Francisco, a Fame-style high school for artistic teenagers. Cho’s first public performance was with the school’s improv group at the legendary Other Cafe, famous for featuring comics like Robin Williams and Paula Poundstone. Soon after, she was doing stand-up all over the Bay Area. At the tender age of 23, she got picked up by an agent who believed in Cho and had the TV contacts to make something miraculous happen. Soon, Cho was meeting with executives from ABC to discuss shooting a sitcom based on her life. The rest is history — or, at least, E! True Hollywood history.

These days, Cho has settled into a comfortable, if hectic, routine. Most of each weekend — Thursday through Sunday — she’s on the road, hopping from one packed amphitheater to another, one hotel to another. Between shows, Cho returns to her home in Hollywood, where she’s lived for the last 10 years. She’s clean and sober and totally in love with her dog, Ralph, named after The English Patient’s Ralph Fiennes, whom Cho thinks is just about the sexiest guy in the world. When Cho spoke to AsianWeek on the phone, she was trying to keep Ralph from devouring the delivery man who had just arrived with her new couch.

For more information about Margaret, check out margaretcho.net. The Notorious C.H.O. tour comes to California on the following dates: San Diego, Dec. 7; Palm Springs, Dec. 14; Long Beach, Jan. 5. The I’m the One that I Want concert film was released on DVD and video in October. The book of the same name is available in hardcover from Ballantine Books and is expected to be released in paperback in Spring 2002.

Currently, Cho has her hands full with several different projects: a new book, a new show, possibly even a children’s cartoon (with strictly G-rated material from Margaret, of course). Life is looking good: she’s doing what she wants, exactly how she wants to be doing it. “I want to be a stand-up comic,” Cho said. “I’ve never wanted to be anything else.”