Posted: Tue 12 Aug 2008 13:25 Post subject: Margaret Cho
Quote:
August 10, 2008
NY Times
Returning in Her Favorite Role, Herself
By MIREYA NAVARRO
RIGHT at the outset of “The Cho Show,” Margaret Cho brings up her unfortunate first dalliance with television, the 1994-95 flop “All-American Girl.”
“Hollywood thought I was too Asian, and Asians thought I wasn’t Asian enough,” she says of her short-lived ABC sitcom.
“The Cho Show,” a new seven-episode, half-hour series billed as a “reality sitcom” and set to start on Aug. 21 on VH1, will be her chance to show a television audience who she really is. In the first episode Ms. Cho, 39, appears naked except for a painted-on dress and a G-string. She also introduces her quirky entourage: Selene Luna, Ms. Cho’s 3-foot-10 assistant and enabler; a gay “glam squad” in charge of the star’s makeup, wardrobe and hair; and her long-suffering parents, Seung Hoon and Young Hie Cho, who are given the rare opportunity to speak for themselves after years of being known only through their daughter’s merciless impersonations.
Ms. Cho is an executive producer in what she described as a blend of unscripted dialogue and scripted situations based on real incidents in her life, which include her often-risqué stand-up routine.
Onstage Ms. Cho is foul-mouthed and as raunchy as she is political, as prone to elaborate on her bisexual exploits as to champion equal rights regardless of gender, sexual orientation or appearance.
Anyone familiar with her observational comedy has also heard about the hopes she had harbored as the first Asian-American to star in her own broadcast network show and about getting her shot and having it backfire.
Not only was her bland, “young and cute” character nothing like her, Ms. Cho has complained, but she was steered to lose weight, which she did so rapidly that she ended up in the hospital.
Ms. Cho was devastated when that show was canceled but has spent the last 13 years away from television establishing her persona, in addition to her stand-up act and concert films, through two books, film work and an off-Broadway show, the neo-burlesque revue “The Sensuous Woman” last year. (Her “Beautiful” tour will visit Radio City Music Hall on Oct 4.)
Like her friend and fellow comedian, Kathy Griffin, who has found television stardom through a reality show, the Emmy-winning “My Life on the D-List,” Ms. Cho has a faithful gay following and parents who are game to be the butt of the joke. But the stakes seem higher for Ms. Cho, who also brings to the table a vulnerability born out of being an anomaly among generally conservative Korean- Americans. Much of the first episode of “The Cho Show” is devoted to her fretting over whether to accept an entertainment achievement award given to her by KoreAm Journal, an English-language monthly magazine that covers Korean-Americans nationwide.
“You’ve never supported me, you don’t care about your kids, you want us all to be pianists,” is what Ms. Cho says she would like to say to the Korean-American media, who once skewered her as “the worst thing to happen to Koreans since they put up the demilitarization zone.”
Her father advises her to cover up her tattoos and accept the award, but a friend’s encouragement holds more sway.
“Let me tell you something, O.K.?,” says Bobby Lee, a Korean-American comedian who appears on “Mad TV” on Fox. “When I was in high school, I saw your special, and it made me realize that I could do it also. Margaret, you’re a pioneer.”
Ms. Cho, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Al Ridenour, a writer and performance artist, said her growing image as a role model comes from “the fact that I’m an Asian-American woman and I’ve survived in the entertainment industry for over 20 years.”
Her parents are also proud, despite bearing the brunt of many awkward moments on their daughter’s show. At one point they present Ms. Cho with new baby clothes, so bent are they on becoming grandparents.
“For your future,” her smiling mother replies.
Ms. Cho, taken aback, replies, “It’s not my size, really.”
In separate interviews her parents, who live in San Diego, where they run a book export business, said they enjoyed being part of “The Cho Show” but admitted their main motivation was to spend more time with their daughter.
“She’s so busy, we only see her a few times a year,” Mrs. Cho, 71, said.
Despite her early disappointment at losing her first television show, Ms. Cho was not easily sold on this new one. Jeff Olde, the VH1 vice president for original programming and production, said it took several meetings over a year and half to get Ms. Cho to trust that she would be allowed to have the show she wanted.
And while still subjected to the standards of basic cable television, he said, Ms. Cho has “great license” to express herself.
For Ms. Cho, the only thing worse than bombing on television would be bombing in front of a room full of Koreans. During the course of the first episode she decides to accept the KoreAm Journal award and during her acceptance speech recalls her dismay at finding out that the killer in the shootings at Virginia Tech last year was not only Korean-American but also named Cho. She lets out a few expletives and, from the faces in the well-heeled audience, it looks as if she’s giving them indigestion.
But the moment passes, and Ms. Cho wins her audience back by making fun of North Koreans and — who else? — her parents, who beam at her.
At the end of the evening a young woman approaches her with a note, from which she tearfully reads: “I totally identify with you. I look up to you because you fight for those who are oppressed and amazingly you do it with humor.” For once Ms. Cho is speechless. More than anything, she said in the interview, “I hope I can inspire other people to do things even though they don’t see anybody else doing it.”
That’s not to say that she doesn’t also pine for more fame and fortune.
“I want mainstream acceptance, I want huge success, I want to play huge stadiums,” she said. “I just do.”
I remember when the show came out, I liked it, granted I found out later that it wasn't her ideal for a show. It proved that an Asian sitcom could be funny despite it's short life span. I am happy for Margaret Cho, she is an amazing & unique force in the entertainment industry.
Last edited by onlyhuman77 on Wed 13 Aug 2008 22:12; edited 1 time in total
I always liked her too and did watch her old show. She seems like a nicer, more authentic and attractive Asian version of fellow comedienne Rosie O'Donell.
She also guest stars from time to time as the wife of Anthony Anderson (AA) on the Fox sitcom 'Til Death'.
Personally I never liked her. I do understand that as a group we should be able to laugh at ourselves, but I've always felt that she pandered to her (predominately white) audience too much.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Margaret Cho had to move to Los Angeles to find commercial renown and meet her husband, Reverend Al of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society. An incessant blogger and deeply thoughtful comedian, Margaret Cho is also a dancer, actress, writer and social critic (Google 'Margaret Cho' to find out more). Interview done over several days by V.Vale.
VALE: You know, it occurred to me that in the history of the whole world you may be the first Asian-American woman comedian. I certainly don't know of anyone else--
MARGARET CHO: Hmm . . . I guess I am.
V: And in fact there have hardly been any Asian-American actresses. There was Anna Mae Wong in the Marlene Dietrich movies from the forties. Who else? Well, whoever played the wife of Charlie Chan. The presence just hasn't been there, so you're like the first. Don't you think that's amazing?
MC: Yeah, I think that's great.
V: But how did you become who you are?
MC: Well, I found my own environment to be pretty stifling, and feeling so limited in what I could do as an Asian-American or Korean- American, I branched out and did a bunch of different things.
V: Right, but that isn't easy. Was your peer-group other Asian Americans?
MC: No. I was raised in a really diverse community--I grew up in San Francisco where there are lots of other Asian-Americans and many other ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and sexual minorities, so it was pretty wide-open and quite a different place to grow up.
V: Well, it's not exactly a prank, but in context, to be an Asian-American or a female comedian is kind of an amazing thing. Remember how Asian women were 'supposed to be' back in the bad old days?
MC: It was so weird--
V: You weren't supposed to stick your neck out at all--
MC: No. But because of that and because of my identity, I actually participated in doing a prank for this group of businessmen. This was a breakfast club meeting in Petaluma, probably in the late eighties, for conservative businessmen--lots of Republican guys. They actually told racist jokes during breakfast. So they hired me to show up and 'attack' the main head guy, to almost give him a heart attack, and then it would be like: 'Ah, it's a joke!'
V: That's weird--
MC: It was horrible! And I didn't know any better. I was taking any paying job I could get, and I was probably about seventeen years old, and these guys saw me at the Holy City Zoo [San Francisco comedy club] where I used to work all time--
V: Wow, at seventeen--
MC: So they saw me and they loved me. And these older guys--I mean I had no idea what they wanted from me--they said, 'Well, we have a gig that we'd love for you to do, and we'll pay seventy- five dollars.' To me that was a huge amount of money, so I said, 'Absolutely, that would be great!' And they're like, 'It's early in the morning. All you have to do is come down and meet us here at 7 AM and come into the meeting and listen for a while. You're welcome to have breakfast with us, and just get really offended by what we're going to talk about. And then at whatever point you feel, really, like just exploding, just go off and yell! Yell mostly at the chairman, because we really want to get at him, but just yell about what's going on and how terrible this all is and how there aren't any other women or people of color, and how they are all rich, and how they are allowing this moment where they can be white and rich and tell racist jokes and congratulate themselves on being so rich and so white!' So I was like, 'Oh, okay!' I thought, 'This is really interesting.'
So I went, and they paid me in advance. I was sitting at the breakfast table with them and they were all giving me strange looks, because it was all old men in their fifties and beyond, and obviously all successful businessmen--the parking lot was full of Mercedes and BMWs. So they weren't sure what to make of me, but nobody was saying anything, and I was just there in my little business suit about to have breakfast with everyone.
So the breakfast started, and the guy who was running it, the chairman, opened the floor and told some very racist joke--I can't remember what it was--but it was a really racist joke about black people, the type you could never tell in mixed company (or any kind of company) but he told it and everybody laughed. Then somebody else told a joke about Affirmative Action, and everybody laughed. At that point I just stood up and started screaming: 'You can't do this! This is absolutely wrong and I can't believe you're doing this! It's so racist and sexist and you should be ashamed of yourself! This is not what this is supposed to be--this is non-inclusionary--this is the worst ivory tower that I've ever seen!'
At first they were afraid because they weren't sure what I was doing there, and then they realized that clearly somebody had put me up to it, and then they all just laughed and applauded-- they were so excited, and the chairman was just tickled pink! It couldn't have been better if I'd popped out of a cake! It was just this perfect thing: 'Here's this woman, she's a minority, she's talking about all of the minorities--and I can't stand minorities! And they've combined every minority into one, and it's coming at me--and it's a joke!' And so it was this intense relief for the chairman--it was a very complicated political prank.
V: Wow, maybe that was the new form of 'popping out of a cake.' Of course, I immediately thought of what I've read about the master-slave relationship, and how a lot of these powerful executive-types have a secret life where they want to be tied up and whipped in a bondage situation--
MC: Right, they want to be beat upon! They want to be yelled at, to alleviate their guilt--they know they've done wrong! And to alleviate their guilt they occasionally host little 'events' like this. Whereas it was funny at the time because it was in the context of good humor, now I look back on it and think, 'That's terrible! They really took advantage of me!' I was so young--
V: Right, you were like a 'trophy Asian'! There are white men who fetishize Asian girls--I'm sure you know all about that--
MC: Oh yeah, but I was so young that I couldn't be aware of all that. I think I was chosen just because I was politically the right kind of person for the job: the perfect minority who they felt so guilty about and wanted to make fun of somehow to alleviate their own guilt, or--
V: A lot of these business types have a sick sense of humor--
MC: I know! They're a sick group because their life is all about greed, and it isn't really about compassion--
V: It's about greed and lying and swindling and defrauding the consumer--
MC: --swindling the consumer and swindling each other and . . . It's a weird world. But they're human beings; they're not such monsters. They have needs, but their needs are met in different ways.
V: Oh, how compassionate of you!
MC: Yes . . . well, maybe they are actually like human beings, and I like that they have these desires and needs that need to be taken care of...
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