Margaret Cho has battled homophobia, racism, booze, drugs and anorexia. And throughout it all, her stand-up comedy has been her biggest ally

THEY say if you want something done you should ask a busy person. Margaret Cho is a busy person.So busy that she hasn’t made it to the Fringe in ten years. There just hasn’t been the time, what with all her television appearances, acting roles, political agitation, extensive stand-up tours around the US, blogging, bellydancing and acquiring new tattoos.

But the thought was always there. The last time she came to Edinburgh she formulated a new show, Notorious C.H.O., which became one of her most successful tours to date. She returns this year with Cho Dependent, also the name of her current Grammy-nominated album of comic minstrelsy. To a CV which already reads comedian, actress, author and activist, she can now add singer and lyricist.

Cho wouldn’t go as far as describing herself as a musician. She drafted in some actual musicians to take care of that part, collaborating with a who’s who of indie hipsterville. Fiona Apple, Ani Difranco, Andrew Bird, Grant Lee Phillips, Ben Lee and Tegan and Sara all composed music for the album, while Cho supplied the lyrics, dissecting sexual politics, relationships and important stuff like lice and camel toes on delightful ditties, to be incorporated into her Fringe show.

Cho has long been a fan of Weird Al Yankovic, the saviour of satirical song (with apologies to Richard Stilgoe). The Fringe fortunes of this somewhat maligned tradition have turned around in recent years, making stars of Tim Minchin and Flight of the Conchords. Cho shares their talent for genre pastiche.

While in Edinburgh, she hopes to do some writing with Australian musical comedy trio Axis of Awesome and her pal Amanda Palmer for her follow-up album Yellow, which is to be her Asian-American answer to The Beatles’ White Album.

"I think songwriting and joke-writing are pretty compatible," says Cho. "I know that historically a lot of joke writers in the 1950s and 60s were also writers of songs. There was a lot of cross-pollination. They’re sympathetic professions."

Both disciplines are in Cho’s blood. Her mother was a singer and Cho was brought up around church music. Her father wrote Korean joke books full of naff one-liners, and both her parents, who owned a bookstore in San Francisco, instilled in her a love of language.

Cho has paid testament to the benefits of growing up in such a multi-cultural, tolerant and inclusive city, but nevertheless she had a miserable time as a teenage misfit, exacerbated when a teacher who had taken her under his wing and encouraged her writing was killed in a homophobic attack. "That was a real blow, being reminded that such hate existed in society," she says.

She was writing jokes as a coping mechanism by the time she was 14. At the age of 16 she left school and became a regular in the city’s comedy clubs – surely no less a hostile environment in its way than high school? "Well, I had the microphone, so that changed everything," she says.

After moving to LA in the early 1990s, she became the toast of the college campus circuit with her outspoken routines on race and sexuality attracting a fervent fanbase of "Cho Hos", especially among the gay community.

Cho, who is bisexual, has described herself as a "safe haven", a rallying point for the disenfranchised. When she was growing up and feeling isolated, it was French and Saunders who fulfilled that role for her. "I connected with Dawn French in particular when I saw her embody all those different characters."

Her problems with self-image came to a head when she was given her first big break on TV. The sitcom All American Girl was originally conceived to be her star vehicle, chronicling life in a Korean-American family, but was culturally watered down for broadcast. "When I was performing as a stand-up comic I was in control of the environment," says Cho. "When I was doing TV I thought I had made it, but the idea that I was in charge was a fallacy. The network was in charge and the problem was that they thought I was too fat."

Cho embarked on such a radical diet that she ended up in hospital with kidney failure. Following her brush with death, she simply fed her eating disorder with drugs and alcohol. "I could never get thin enough," she says, "but what was good was that I kept doing comedy and performing which I love, and it was better that I did that because it didn’t matter what size I was in stand-up comedy."

In the last few years, Cho has channelled those experiences and her views on the beauty industry into her stand-up show Beautiful. She was comfortable enough to roll up – as Kim Jong-Il – on a recent episode of 30 Rock and vowed to appear naked in every episode of her 2008 series The Cho Show – so, she said, that the producers of All American Girl could see her ass and kiss it. She has also taken up bellydancing and developed her off-Broadway burlesque show The Sensuous Woman, but admits her struggle with anorexia is not over. "Attitudes to women’s bodies are even more hostile now because of the internet," she says. "I’m concerned about young women who are being fed the idea that it’s desirable to be very thin."

These days, the liberal Californian is adapting to life in the conservative south, where her current TV gig Drop Dead Diva is filmed. Last year, she appeared as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars, America’s version of Strictly Come Dancing, alongside Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol. Cho has previously described Palin Sr as "the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11", incurring the family’s wrath when she blogged that Palin had forced her daughter to compete on the show to rehabilitate her wholesome family image.

"The weird thing was that we became friends because you do get close to the other contestants on a show like that," says Cho. "But when I brought that out in the open Bristol came at me with anti-gay slurs. Her family’s politics are very anti-women and anti-gay. I don’t think they’re good for politics but I think they would make a great reality TV family – they’re the Alaskardashians."

Cho’s own tenure on the show was cut short – she believes because she chose to dance in a rainbow dress as a show of support for bullied gay teens. "It was too gay, which is crazy because that show is so gay," she says, adding that "it’s one thing to dance, but it’s another thing to get the chance to stand up for what you believe in."

If you want a stand-up to believe in, ask Margaret Cho.

Margaret Cho – Cho Dependent, Assembly George Square, until 29 August

www.assemblyfestival.com