Margaret Cho is sending a radical political message with her new stand-up show: being beautiful does not mean you have to be tall, thin, blonde and on the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” It may seem like an obvious sentiment, but in a world in which we are constantly bombarded with ideal images of beauty in magazines and advertisements, it’s an easy one to forget. Margaret Cho wants to remind us, and she wants to make us laugh while doing it. That’s why she’s named her fifth and latest stand-up tour “Beautiful.”

“Saying that you are beautiful and feeling beautiful, especially when you don’t fit the accepted mold, is a political statement,” Cho said. “The show is about feeling beautiful and how race, sexuality, gender and politics fit into that.”

Cho has a lot of experience to speak from. As an Asian-American female comedian who frequently and openly discusses her sexuality on stage, Cho has had her work cut out for her in comparison to the other comics of her generation, such as Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller.

“These are the comics I came up with,” Cho said. “I used to have some bitterness about how my unconventional identity made success harder for me than for them, but at the same time, I’ve been able to forge my own path.”

Fighting to have her comedy heard was an uphill battle against racism and expectations to fulfill Hollywood standards of beauty. When “All-American Girl,” the sitcom based on her stand-up comedy, premiered in 1995, Cho was pressured to lose weight to fulfill the network’s expectations. The show was eventually cancelled, and Cho says her life went into a downward spiral. She eventually came to realize the ridiculousness of the situation and made a comeback using that struggle as a basis for her comedy act “I’m the One I Want” in 1999. But if this sounds too heavy to be stand-up material, Cho’s specialty is turning difficult experiences into something people can relate to and laugh about.

“The ability of comedy to heal is powerful, and sometimes it’s all we have,” Cho said. “Nothing can make you feel better than laughing, and I’m really proud to be a part of that.”

Along with her personal experiences, Cho often brings politics into her act.

“I think politics is a world I belong in and don’t belong in at the same time,” Cho says.

This is perhaps because of her penchant for saying what she really thinks. “I was a campaign surrogate for Barack Obama, but I was fired because of some of the things I said about Sarah Palin,” Cho said.

Despite being fired from the campaign, Cho said she will still support Obama and is particularly opposed to Sarah Palin, a topic she discusses in “Beautiful.”

After “Beautiful,” Cho plans to continue doing stand-up tours and producing her semi-scripted reality show “The Cho Show” on VH1, which Cho says is much closer to her stand-up than her previous sitcom. The show features Cho’s parents, who have always been a feature of her stand-up, and a group of friends that accompany Cho on her adventures.

“It’s great. I have complete control over the material, and I get to show my family, which is unconventional, but very much a real family,” she said.

As for future stand-up tours, Cho is interested in branching out into the world of musical comedy, something she experiments with in “Beautiful” by performing a comedic song. “I want to do a show with all comedy songs,” Cho said. “I’ve always loved Weird Al, so I’m really excited about the idea of doing something like that.”