11:14 PM CST on Saturday, April 2, 2005

By MICHAEL GRANBERRY / The Dallas Morning News

The most telling moment in Margaret Cho's stand-up comedy show on Friday night at the Majestic Theatre came when she revealed that she had recently been hired to entertain a gathering of Republican hotel owners, whose leader is a buddy to President Bush.

This had to have been one of the most colossal blunders in booking history, as in, "What were they thinking?"

For if anyone who voted in the majority during the last presidential election had happened to wander in off the street Friday night, they would have quickly figured out that they have no business dealing with Cho business.

Ms. Cho called her appearance before the Republican hotel owners "the worst blind date ever" and said, "They kept telling me to get off the stage. So I decided, 'If you don't like me, I'm going to make you
hate me.' "

Which says it all about this daringly bold comic. She and her act are as coy and subtle as a "shock and awe" bombing raid.

Bringing her "Assassin" tour to Dallas, Ms. Cho regaled her predominantly gay audience with salvo after salvo from her own verbal weapons-of-mass-destruction machine. By the end of the
90-minute show, no one in the president's family or inner circle had been spared. Most references were sexually charged or rife with profanity.

But for anyone who thinks Dallas is a city that lacks diversity, including its political opinions, think again. The near-capacity crowd all but laughed itself silly at every word.

Wearing a low-cut black blouse and blue jeans with a glittery belt, Ms. Cho occasionally pulled a surprise, noting, for instance, that wearing a burqa might have advantages: "I would much rather wear a burqa than go on a diet. I'm pretty sure I could fit a whole cake under there and just flick the crumbs out of the eyeholes."

In this show, only the pope got spared. She devoted a single comment to Terri Schiavo, saying essentially that the furor over her death is "none of my business." Even John Kerry took a hit, with her
comparing him to an "Ent," one of those treelike creatures from Lord of the Rings.

But that was only one joke. The champion of the slow-moving targets on this night was the president and one of his primary constituencies, the Christian right, which, in the mind of Ms. Cho, is the anti-gay,
anti-female force on whose dogma he rode to a second term.

One outcome of recent elections she does like, however, is the red state-blue state factor. Such "color-coded maps" are good, she said, because "they show us where all the stupid people live."