"That changed in the'90s, when clubs started to close. The comedy boom died down in the'90s. A lot of comedians were out of work, and the ones who survived were the ones who were really good or worked really hard," Cho said.

"Either that, or you had a television show."

Cho, who is coming to the Byrd Theatre on Feb. 15, had a television show, "All-American Girl." The one-season sitcom was based on her experience growing up in a Korean household. It was the first American television show with an all-Asian cast.

"It helped me a lot. It helped me tremendously going on the road and being able to do the big clubs," said the 39-year-old Cho.

Hughley, who begins a three-day gig tomorrow at the Richmond Funny Bone, had much the same situation. Although he had performed several times on "Def Comedy Jam" and was the host of "BET's Comicview" for two years, he hit the big time with his own sitcom, "The Hughleys."

The show ran for four years, and, as he joked on the phone from Los Angeles, the advantage to having his name on the show was "No one can fire you."

For Hughley, 44, that show made all the difference.

"It wasn't until 'The Hughleys' came on that I was able to work places like the Improv and Funny Bone. . . . Anytime you're exposed to a large group of people, they feel like they have an intimate knowledge of you. It can entice [them] to come or it could drive [them] away.

"I've always been one of those cats who does TV to make sure people will want to come to see me. I don't do stand-up to get on TV; I do TV to make sure people come see me do stand-up," he said.

On the phone from her house in Los Angeles, Cho said, "I think comedy survives because of television. Because of television you are compelled to write more. People see your material. You have to keep producing, but I think that's important anyway for comedians, to keep writing material. It used to be that you could do the same 45 minutes for your entire career."

Although mainstream comedy clubs were blossoming everywhere at the time, Hughley found it impossible to get booked at them before his stint on "The Hughleys."

"They just didn't see 'Def Jam' comics or black comics as viable. They just saw a couple of black comics as viable. Maybe Chris Rock and . . . that was it," he said.

Instead of the established clubs, Hughley and other black comedians could find work only at sketchy dance halls. They would fly in for the show that was produced by "somebody with some money on their hands -- no matter how they got it." Sometimes the comics would get paid; sometimes they would not.

These clubs catered to an exclusively black crowd. Even at the Comedy Act Theater in L.A., where performers included Robert Townsend, Sinbad and Eddie Murphy, the only whites in the audience were agents and managers looking to sign talent. And even that lasted only awhile.

"After the L.A. riots, all [the whites] you saw was the police," Hughley said.

As the comedy business contracted, the performers and audiences became more racially mixed. But Cho sees that trend reversing.

"Now we have to categorize [comics] in terms of race or ethnicity, like the Original Latin Divas of Comedy, or the Kings of Comedy, or the Queens of Comedy, or Def Comedy Jam. There is a delivery system now where everything is racially divided," she said.

"You have it delivered by race or gender, or in some ways sexuality -- they have a lot of gay comics now," said Cho, who has a large gay following.

Cho and Hughley say that while other comedians are confrontational and intentionally offensive, neither of them works that way -- although Cho admits to being frank and Hughley acknowledged that "some of the most innocuous things I've said have been offensive."

Both say their humor emerges instead from being honest, staying true to their own personal ways of looking at the world.

According to Cho, comedians are always looking for a hook to what they see around them, to find out how they can use some new information to their advantage or make them seem cool.

"I think that comedy is really about looking cool," she said. "When you're a comedian, all people care about is that you look cool and that you look like you know what you're doing."