Inferno interview: the beautiful Margaret Cho
By: Whitney Paige Green
Posted: 4/21/08

Margaret Cho is back on the road doing one of her famous national stand-up tours. "Beautiful" is Cho's first national tour since 2005; the show's already received awesome reviews. Our fair city will be that much finer on Apr. 26, when Margaret is sure to bring down the house at The Chicago Theatre.

And don't think for a minute that the Notorious C.H.O. has been slacking off between tours. Margaret's been working on a number of projects, one of which included dancing naked in an off-Broadway burlesque show. But now she's come back to her roots: performing stand-up, and telling us what's on her mind.

Inferno: What is special/important about your show? What do you hope to achieve with it?

Margaret Cho: I just want to get back to stand-up, and I really love it. I think this show is really great. I'm excited about getting back on tour. It's a little hard because I'm splitting my time: I'm doing my TV show (I'm doing a new TV show for VH1 called "The Cho Show") part of the week and then the other part of the week I'm doing stand-up. So it's funny because stand-up comedy now is sort of my break - my free time. So it's a way for me to just get back to what I normally do, and what I really love doing.

I: What do you love about stand-up?

M: It's just very easy for me. It's just something that I grew up doing. You know, I started doing stand-up when I was 16, and it's a really familiar world to me. I love it. And, you know, you can write your own comedy, and you're responsible for your own stuff - it's all you. It's so great because you don't have to answer to anybody else.

I: How do you feel about the way your shows and performances have evolved through your career? And how do you feel they impact people?

M: Well, I feel great; I mean, I really love what I do. I really enjoy being able to travel around and perform comedy. People really have a good time. They laugh and they feel great and they get to hang out. It's a fun thing.

I: I know you've talked about the meaning of the word "beautiful," but what do you think beauty really is and how do you feel about other people's thoughts on beauty?

M: Well, I think everybody should feel beautiful. It's a really important thing because our society thrives off of us not feeling beautiful. That's how they end up selling us everything, you know? That sort of feeling of being inadequate will really make you victim to every sort of sales tactic or whatever things that'll make you feel like they'll make you better, but they don't. I mean, I love shopping, and I love being a consumer as well. But we need to consume things out of just the joy of consuming them as opposed to insecurity or fear. And I think that if you feel good about yourself, if you feel beautiful, you'll be more active politically or you'll be more willing to use your voice and be heard, and I think all these things are very important.

I: You talk about "self-esteem" in your other shows. I think it's really interesting how you said, "with a low self-esteem, it's hard to think of yourself as an American [if you belong to a certain group(s)]." How do you think "beauty" relates to self-esteem?

M: Well, I think that feeling beautiful is really the ultimate expression of self-esteem. If you feel beautiful, you really feel good about yourself. You feel grateful to be who you are. It's a really wonderful expression of self-esteem - and a really important one - so I think "beauty" is the highest expression of it.

I: I just did a bunch of research for Asian American Awareness month, and looked into a couple of the biggest issues that we're dealing with at UIC. I'm wondering what you think are the kinds of things that Asian Americans share with other ethnic minorities in the United States, and the things that set them apart (in a genuine way).

M: I think what brings us together is that we're all dealing with the label of minority, and that we all deal with these problems of non-inclusion from mainstream society. Invisibility. There are lots of issues. And then if you split them up even further, you go bi-racial versus people who are not bi-racial (I think being bi-racial is a really difficult experience because you're sort of not in either culture but you are of either culture, which is similar to the immigrant experience for Asian Americans, because we're not really accepted as Americans, but we're not accepted as 'Asian' either. There's this very weird kind of non-existence or non-inclusion).

I'd say that the thing that brings us together is that we are not part of the majority, and therefore are kind of thought of as a 'specialty' or minority group. It's interesting, nowadays I'll look on the news, or see people like Tucker Carlson talking about [how] upset that he's now a minority. He's upset that as a straight white man, he feels eclipsed by the hugeness of somebody like Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton, and how much they matter right now in terms of politics, in terms of the presidential race, and he feels like he's excluded. He's very upset about it, and I think that's really funny, because that's the constant minority experience! We're always left out of the equation, always left out of this sort of discussion.

You know, if you look back this last year in race and talking about race, three major things happened: Michael Richards, who's Kramer from "Seinfeld," had his huge racial explosion at The Laugh Factory; Don Imus, who was talking about the Rutgers' women's basketball team; and Duane "Dog" Chapman. They were all talking, they're all white men - privileged white men - who suddenly revealed that they had racism, that their racism that was deep inside in an unguarded moment came out. It was a really big deal. So this last year was really good in talking about race because it gave the white majority this idea that people of color are listening, and that people of color are also becoming very intolerant of the intolerance. That's what brings everybody together.

I think what sets us apart is a kind of racism within the racism - the racism that we all feel, that is sort of inherent in our own culture, that's outside of the 'American-ness.' I'm Korean, so my family [and] traditional Koreans are very racist towards pretty much everybody who's not Korean. So that to me is not necessarily racist; it's more just a xenophobic attitude. But then when you bring it to America, it becomes 'racist.' So then that's when you have a lot of problems in the communities where there's a lot a Blacks and Koreans living together, then the Black community perceives Koreans as being racist towards them, but really Koreans hate everybody. So it's not personal, but they take it personally.

And then the Black culture,, because of the Civil Rights Movement, they have a great, wonderful, engraved sense of self-esteem that's politicized, and so they are used to taking action and used to defending themselves, which is a really great thing. That's something that I hope other minorities can study and look to as an example of how to be, how to live. I think that we can learn a lot from each other, that we're all at different stages of 'American-ness,' becoming more 'American,' and it's a very long discussion.

And people, let me tell you, it was a long discussion! So long, in fact, that we're going to print the second half of this interview in the next issue of the Inferno. So tune back in next week to read up on Margaret's vibrant opinions regarding body image, sexuality and the current political scene.