Outstanding comic Margaret Cho tackles taboos with honesty, writes Lenny Ann Low.

An outspoken bisexual, feminist and equal rights campaigner, Margaret Cho is known for her frank comic style. ''I'm not really into the supermodel body type,'' she says in her live show, Beautiful. ''Like, Kate Moss - she doesn't have a vagina. She didn't feed it and it died.''

In stand-up shows such as Beautiful, I'm the One that I Want, Assassin and Notorious C.H.O., Cho has baited Republicans, told jokes about anal sex, analysed body image issues, sung a rap song called My Puss (in her mother's exaggerated Korean accent) and shown up racists with cool, calm and ultimately hilarious logic.

In her 2007 neo-burlesque revue, The Sensuous Woman, a celebration of all kinds of human beauty, Cho stood before a huge sign spelling "S-E-X" in lights and told graphic jokes about sex - gay, lesbian and straight - while wearing a peephole dress and brandishing enormous red-feathered fans.

Later, after performances by a prosthetic penis-bearing stripper and a plus-size dancer extracting ribbons from her bottom, Cho bared her elaborately tattooed body, twirled nipple pasties and let loose more one-liners.

The Sensuous Woman is just one of many career diversions for Cho, who has been married to artist, writer and straight man Al Ridenour since 2003.

Last month she finished filming another series of TV dramedy Drop Dead Diva - in which she plays legal assistant Teri Lee. Last year she released a comedy music album, Cho Dependent, which was nominated for a Grammy award. The album, which features tracks such as Captain Cameltoe and Calling in Stoned, inspired the show she performs at the Just For Laughs comedy festival at the Opera House next Friday.

''I like to do a lot of different things,'' Cho says. ''I like to entertain myself. It's also a chance to collaborate with lots of amazing artists. Ben Lee was a major collaborator on my record, so were people like Andrew Bird, Fiona Apple, Tegan and Sara and Ani DiFranco. It's very gratifying.''

Having grown up in San Francisco in the 1970s and '80s, Cho began performing stand-up as a 16-year-old in a comedy club called The Rose & Thistle above Paperback Traffic, the bookstore her parents ran. Before long, she won a comedy competition to open for Jerry Seinfeld. He loved her act and Cho's comedy career was born.

''You know, there is a sort of a hierarchy in comedy, a myth that women don't belong there,'' she says. ''But I've always treasured female voices in comedy. People like Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell. They were people that really changed things for me.

''I do lots of different things but stand-up is the art form that I know the best. It's what I'm good at and that is a good feeling.''

Things were both rosy and difficult during her recent appearance on the US version of Dancing With the Stars.

''The motivating factor for anybody to do DWTS is the money,'' Cho says. ''It's really obscene … The fitness is good, too, and that I actually kept up with, which is rather a change for me. But the money - people rarely talk about that.''

It was on the show Cho met, and became friends with, Bristol Palin, daughter of former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

''I was very embarrassed because, before I met Bristol, I'd said so many horrible things about her mother,'' she says. ''But later Bristol and I got into a huge fight. It was very odd - being friends with someone and then having a very public disagreement with them. It turned really ugly and strange and weird.''

Cho has often explained her dislike of Sarah Palin. In 2008 on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, she reiterated her belief that Palin's politics were bad for women, before adding: ''But I do kind of want to have sex with her.''

''It makes you feel so dirty, '' Cho says. ''It's awful. It's because she's so my opposite in so many ways, there is that attraction. If you're completely appalled by someone, there's something about them that you must kind of like - so that must be it. I'm just appalled at myself.''