Free Flow With Margaret Cho
Source: AOL
Posted: 09/03/08 11:04AM
Filed Under: Television
By CHRIS JANCELEWICZ
Comic sensation Margaret Cho is finally branching out on her own terms, with a new show called The Cho Show. Expect nothing less than classic Cho - crass, crude, and shockingly hilarious. We sat and talked for what seemed like mere minutes as the time melted away. I'm now convinced that some people are just born funny.
You grew up in San Francisco. And it was a fairly unusual upbringing, yes?
Well, my parents owned a bookstore there, and they employed a lot of gay people. It was a bookstore that catered to the gay community. And so, my father had this plan in mind where he thought I should be raised by gay men; he felt that gay men knew more about art, literature, and music. It was important to him that I grew up with good taste. We couldn't afford a finishing school, so being around a bunch of drag queens was probably the next best thing.
You must have learned a lot about clothes and fashion as well.
Yes! I do! I'm actually a designer. I spend a lot of time sewing stuff. I used to have a clothing line, but it ended up being too much work. I can't keep up, it's too hard. I get a little too Project Runway with it.
So I assume you're watching 'Project Runway' (season 5) right now?
Oh, yeah. I'm a little upset right now about the gay Mormon leaving. But he was bitchy about it. He couldn't take criticism, which is one of the main things of Project Runway. The judges really like it if you can take criticism.
Wasn't there a gay Mormon on 'Survivor' too?
Yeah, it's a trend. You either have a transgendered person, or a gay Mormon. Take a look at I Want to Work for Diddy or the new cycle of America's Next Top Model.
When you first moved to L.A., were you intimidated?
Yes, I was very intimidated and scared. You know, when I got here, it was really hard. One of the first things I did, I was friends with Rob Schneider, and he let me meet his agent, and said, 'These people are great, I'm sure they'll love you.' I went into the office, and the agent said I would never, ever, ever be successful in show business and I should quit. He said that Asian people would never be successful in entertainment and it was just a fact.
Okay. Wow.
It was funny, because when I did my short-lived TV show All-American Girl, that agent was representing some of the actors on the show. He kept trying to talk to me, and I wouldn't even talk or look at him. I'm like, 'You're dead to me.'
How many episodes of that show ran before it was taken off the air?
There were 22. But we ran into a lot of problems, despite our ratings. The fact that we were Asian, it had a lot to do with that.
I find that strange, since 'In Living Color' was on at the same time, and the humour was pretty racial.
Steve Park was on there, yeah. Besides the race problem, though, with All-American Girl, they kept telling me I was too fat. They kept saying it: fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. Critics were saying it too. And that I was ugly. I think it was because they'd never seen an Asian person before, and they didn't know what we looked like. I'm totally serious, it's all about racism. So now, in The Cho Show, I'm naked in every episode, so they can see my ass and then kiss it.
Did all those comments about your weight really mess you up?
It totally f--ked me up. I ended up being hospitalized for anorexia, and I still have a bunch of health problems. Because of anorexia and bulimia, I wouldn't eat for weeks and I got really sick. That was a big problem. That's why now I'm super into trying to get young girls to love their bodies and I always try to encourage young women to feel good about themselves.
How much of the critics' and public's negative reaction to you was because you're a woman? Because male comedians get away with much worse without so much as a peep from critics.
The Korean community really didn't accept me because I was talking so much about sex and gay stuff, and they were really alarmed by my presence. They didn't ask for me to be a representative. Different Korean organizations wrote to me and told me they were going to protest and picket outside my house. Little Korean girls wrote me letters - though I'm sure they were written by their parents - saying that I made them ashamed to be Korean, and s-t like that. What was great is that all those people died and now their kids really love me. The older Korean generation kind of died off, or they probably all have Alzheimer's now, so f--k them. That's what the first episode of The Cho Show is all about.
So, by all accounts, your fame is something of an anomaly. You have three things working against you: you have the Korean descent, you're a woman, and you have the...I don't know what to call it, the bisexuality?
My queerness! And also, I work as a gay activist, that's a big part of my life. I grew up during the assassination of Harvey Milk [the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco] in 1978. I devoted a lot of my time to making sure that nobody would get killed for being gay. I'm not sure how much of an impediment my queerness is to fame, I think it's more the ethnicity that's the problem.
I hear you went to the Democratic convention with Rufus Wainwright and Cyndi Lauper. How was that?
It was good, it was the youngest convention I've ever seen.
See? That's so cool. Up here we have boring politics.
No, you guys have cool politics. You have same sex marriage and medical marijuana. What more could you want? And you have Broken Social Scene. Canada is where you want to live. I would want to live there. The difference in Canada is there's a sincere effort to be inclusive. It's very progressive in terms of accepting different cultures and types of people. You see it on TV, in music, everywhere.
And that's why when I hear you say things like 'Being Korean was a huge impediment for me,' it sounds crazy to me.
That's what's cool about Canada. There's definitely much more of an immigrant population in some of the cities, but the culture is much more sensitive and inclusive.
The U.S. is a bit scary when it comes to that, to be honest.
The U.S. is totally scary when it comes to that kind of stuff. That's why I love doing this TV show. When you present people with an image of themselves, they really feel like they exist, and it's powerful. It goes beyond entertainment; it really is a validation. It makes people feel like they matter, and that feeling is amazing.
Racial comedy is really difficult to pull off without offending anyone. Do you get a lot of hate mail? Fan mail?
Yes and yes. A lot of the fan mail is great, beautiful fan mail. It's not 'send me an 8' x 10''', it's a 'you saved my life' mail. And the hate mail is 'I'm going to kill you!' There's also every possible insult about my looks, my weight, my ethnicity, my age, my family, and my gayness. Death threats are constant.
What do you do about that?
You get a really high-security system for your house, that's the first step. But also, you just have to not take it personally. I don't even take the good stuff personally. That way I remain even keel. People respond to me like that because I was the first Asian-American person they saw on TV. My presence had an important impact on them. Also, I was one of the first people to talk about gay stuff. I'm an icon to people, not because I'm great, but because I was brave.
Is Margaret Cho afraid of anything?
Most bugs. I'm allergic to any sort of insect sting - my body would just swell up if I was stung. I'm afraid to skydive, because I was in a hot air balloon accident.
I can honestly say I've never heard that before in my life.
It was really bad. It was f--cked up. Hot air balloons freak me out. If I see a bunch of them in a field or whatever, it totally screws me up. We got caught in a wind storm, and basically crash landed in a field. It was like a plane crash. I was in between the propane tanks and the basket, so I had huge bruises on my chest from the tanks banging on my body. So I am scared of hot air balloons, but not of heights. Weird.
For more of this incredible humour (brace yourselves!), watch Margaret's new show, 'The Cho Show', which premieres on The Comedy Network on Monday, September 8 at 10 pm ET/PT.
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