The Alchemist - Margaret Cho mixes comedy and music and the result is more than shocking
Published: Thursday, June 24, 2010, 5:58 AM
Michael Dumas, Press-Register

Comedienne Margaret Cho will debut material from her upcoming comedy rock album "Cho Dependent" at Hard Rock Live in Biloxi on Saturday. Cho said proceeds from her tour will benefit the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport.
BILOXI, Miss. -- It just got even harder to stereotype Margaret Cho.

For two decades, the comedienne has stood on stage, screen and page, spouting some of the raunchiest, wittiest and most socially charged humor around. Her skin is a map of tattoo art and you never know what sort of fashion she’ll be wearing, or for that matter, designing.

Cho even weaves stereotypes into her comedy, using a stark, gravelly voice and facial contortions to produce caricatures of her Korean mother so personal, it would almost shame us to laugh if we didn’t hear her describing situations that could have come out of the Southern Sass Handbook.

And now, years after her first primetime sitcom was cancelled by ABC and days after her newest com-dram on Lifetime, "Drop Dead Diva," began its second season, Cho is coming to Biloxi in support of ... a comedy rock album?

It shouldn’t be as surprising as it sounds. After all, Cho describes herself as an "intense music geek" and, during a recent phone interview, admitted a passionate love for seminal parodist Weird Al Yankovic.

"He’s my all-time favorite," Cho said in the somewhat sweet, thoughtful tone that is leagues from the crescendos of her on-stage persona. "I love what he does and I wanted to do songs that matched his scale of production but at the same time were not song parodies."

That’s how "Cho Dependent," to be released on Aug. 24, came to be.

That’s not to say her show at 8 p.m. Saturday at Hard Rock Live will be one big concert. Cho says her act is still primarily stand up, only now infused with lyrics she wrote, combined with melodies she elicited from a mélange of musician friends including Grant Lee Phillips, The Raconteurs’ Brendan Benson and Ani DiFranco.

"(The album) was about finding these great collaborations with people I really love," she said.

Even with a striking diversity and production value to the 14 tracks on the album, the result is pure Cho.

"Cho Dependent" starts off with an "Intervention" and ends with a send-up of her vagina, pausing in-between to get high with Tommy Chong, lambaste her enemies and former lovers and sing a languid R&B ode to male genitalia.

The album succeeds along the lines of Yankovic’s and those of Cho’s other contemporaries — like Tenacious D and the Bloodhound Gang — with first-rate music combined with laugh lines worthy of a spit take via milk, beer or an internal organ.

Take, for example, the raucous near-country tune "Eat Sh— and Die" with Grant Lee Phillips, who co-founded the band Grant Lee Buffalo in the ’90s. It’s almost like Weird Al doing Jeff Tweedy, except there’s only one parody on “Cho Dependent.” She calls that song, “My Puss,” a “perfect cover” and the only officially sanctioned parody of Mickey Avalon’s “My D—ck.”

No matter how good the sound gets, Cho still considers what she’s doing to be in the medium of stand-up comedy. It’s just that she’s driven to evolve her skill set to the absolute brim.

"To me, it’s still about jokes," she said. "There’s a long-standing tradition of guitar comics (and) I always had a great respect for that."