Hot off new TV gig, Cho takes the McCallum stage Friday

Bruce Fessier
Desert Post Weekly

Margaret Cho is done with her “Sensuous Woman” tour.

Her performance Friday night at the McCallum Theatre will unveil her under the title, “The Beautiful Woman.”

After touring in ensemble comedy, Cho is returning to solo stand-up to expose her political humor just before the November election.

Needless to say, the star of the VH1 reality series “The Cho Show” isn't on the McCain-Palin campaign trail.

She is pleased Gov. Sarah Palin is tolerant of gay rights.

“It's her views on abortion that I have a problem with,” Cho said in a recent telephone interview. “She wants to outlaw abortion. That's really a problem. You don't want to be limiting women's rights if you're going to call yourself a feminist.”

Cho, 39, has become much more political since starring in the 1994 sitcom “All American Girl.” She actually had to be coached on how to be “more Asian” for the producers of that series.

“It was really a ridiculous thing,” said Cho, whose Korean-American parents are a big part of her new comedy series.

“I didn't know how to ask for what I needed. They put all these things on me that didn't make sense. Now I trust myself a lot more. When I do ‘The Cho Show' on VH1, I'm very much involved in the writing and I'm the producer and I created the show. So, it's a different kind of experience.”

Cho grew up in San Francisco in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural environment. She is an outspoken proponent of gay rights and has actually performed gay marriages.

She became a professional comic as a teenager and earned a spot on a Bob Hope television special at 19.

Hope was about 85, and Cho's overriding memory of the program was: “He was so old! I couldn't believe they would trot him out and still make him work.”

She got on the show, she said, because she was hot on the comedy club circuit.

“I'd been doing a lot of television at that time, like ‘Evening at the Improv' and shows like that,” she said. “So, I was in the mix. I stood out from the crowd because of my ethnicity and my age, and because I'm a woman.”

She called it “phenomenal” to be selected for the historic NBC special. And she said there was a lot of history on the Hope set.

“His whole crew had been with him his whole time,” she said. “The only way somebody would leave was if somebody would die.

“I remember (daughter) Linda Hope screaming so loud at him. He didn't know what he was doing and didn't know what direction he was facing. They had to position him — quite like a corpse — because he was so on his last legs.

“He actually lived for many years afterward, but, he was so old, it was just a funny thing because they would sort of maneuver him around. Then, when I watched the monologue, it was amazing because they had actually cut it together. It was almost like stop-motion animation.

“Really, you had to move him, then take a picture, then move him, then take a picture and then move him and then take a picture, and then you would have a set.”