Publish Date: 14-Apr-2005

Margaret Cho has never met a medium she didn’t like. She’s gone from young standup comic with her own sitcom (1994’s All-American Girl) to comedy diva with a rabid following who tours her one-woman shows seemingly every year. CDs and feature-film documentation follow each tour; one of them even became a best-selling book (I’m the One That I Want [Ballantine, 2002]). As if that weren’t enough, she tells the Straight on the phone from her Los Angeles home, “I’m making a quilt, too, as we speak right now. I’m trying to decide what to put on next. I do a lot of things. I also belly dance on weekdays.”

Cho’s three previous tours were intimate monologues on her problems with dieting, sex, race, and drug abuse. The current one, which she brings to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Friday (April 15), is called the Assassin Tour because “it’s all about verbally assassinating everybody, including myself.” More political than her earlier live shows, it takes aim at George Bush’s America.

“I think politics overwhelmingly is personal,” says the Korean- American. “It’s become personal for everyone lately. Because it’s such a difficult time. It’s so crazy because people are so much more emotionally involved in politics than they’ve ever been....It’s shocking because you would expect that the government would feel obligated to do good things for us, but it’s kind of not the case. It’s so much more corrupt than I’ve ever seen it. It’s quite depressing.”

Cho’s targets also include the religious right and its insistence that homosexuals, her biggest fans, not be allowed to marry. She’s even intimated that Pope John Paul II had gay-like qualities, which got her into trouble with the moral minority. “The Pope recently castigated the media for making gays look normal,” she wrote in the October 22, 2004, issue of In These Times. “Yeah, he’s a real good judge of normal. With the gold dress, and the matching gold hat, living up in the Vatican with 500 men, surrounded by the finest antiques in the world. You go, girl!” In real life, Cho professes an admiration for the late pontiff. “I like the Pope,” she says, mixing up her tenses after his recent death. “I think he’s kind of funny and cute. He was progressive for what he is.”

That admission may surprise a lot of her opponents. Then again, the “Bible-thumping, cousin-humping genetic mistakes”, as she has called her overly pious critics, become unhinged over practically anything. “The whole Christian-right thing to me is very upsetting,” she explains, “because I’m a Christian and I’m very involved in learning about God and learning about other religions and other forms of spirituality and being very accepting of every aspect of it. And the incredible hypocrisy that goes on right now in these kind of church-fuelled political debates, it’s really a disaster. Christians are not as Christian as they used to be.”

Most political humorists—like Bill Maher, who played here a few weeks ago—sing to the choir. Very little of what they say on-stage is new, and the danger is that the comedy gets lost in all that message. It’s all well and good to sit there and go, “Hear, hear!”, but isn’t at least one of the goals to change a few minds?

Cho believes she cuts across political divisions. “I think my reach is pretty wide. There are people that come to my shows who don’t necessarily feel what I feel politically but really enjoy what I’m doing as an artist,” she says. “It’s not really about the message so much as the medium. It’s more than just a political night out. It’s not a fundraiser; it’s a show. I can enjoy things that I don’t agree with politically. Like, I love hip-hop and I love rap. It’s incredibly homophobic and incredibly sexist but I have to get past that, which is okay. I like it enough to almost condone those things. Because I don’t agree with it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it.”

Maybe her evolution from confessional comic to political preacher is all about growing up. “I’ve gotten more informed,” she says. “I’ve always had a rebellious streak, or this idea that I had to find some kind of rebellion somewhere. Now I see and I want to be involved because I have an opportunity to say something about it.”

Still, whether Cho has an effect on the way people think is largely irrelevant to her. “I would like to be making some sort of an impact,” she admits. “I imagine I am, and I would find it hard to believe if I wasn’t. But in any case, it’s fun. So it doesn’t matter.”