And there we go – another perfect Margaret Cho one-liner. She is, of course, talking about last year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. She was in Sydney debuting her new one-woman show, Beautiful, and was also given the coveted role of ‘Chief of Parade’, along with locals Shane Brennan and Craig Gee, victims of a brutal gay bashing on Oxford Street just two months before.

“It was wonderful,” Cho tells SX. “It was the biggest gay pride event I’ve ever seen in my life – which is saying a lot because I’ve been to a lot of them!

There has always been a healthy dose of politics in Cho’s material. In 2004, she took her politically-charged State of Emergency on the road ahead of the US presidential election. She has also received the First Amendment Award from the ACLU of California and has been honoured by a number of GLBT organisations, including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

This month Cho releases a DVD of her popular reality-sitcom, The Cho Show, which follows her, her real parents, and her eccentric entourage through a series of utterly outrageous experiences – all shaped by her ‘anything goes’ brand of stand-up. It is this irreverence that has landed her in hot water many times before – but she couldn’t care less.

“I think when the world was more conservative after 9/11, it was really difficult to criticise the government,” she muses. “So those types of things got me in a lot of trouble. But I have a pretty thick skin.

“I think if you grow up and you’re called racial slurs and ‘fag’ and ‘queer’ and ‘homo’ and ‘dyke’ ... you just don’t even hear them anymore and certainly don’t care. So yeah, I get a lot of that and I don’t care.”

The Cho Sho Season 1 DVD is out now through Beyond Home Entertainment.