In the interest of keeping this a family-friendly publication, I can't write much of what Margaret Cho told me about her comedy show.

I can't repeat the joke about her _____, or how she had ______ injected in to her _____, or how a psychic once told her that her ______ was haunted.

"Yeah, it's a filthy dirty, really really totally dirty show," Cho says over the phone from Los Angeles where she's preparing to take her new standup show, Beautiful, on the road.

When the tour stops at Centre in the Square on Oct. 12, people in the audience had better be prepared for a raunchy, uncensored comic onslaught.

You could say her show is for "mature audiences only," but Cho disagrees:

"I would say it's for immature audiences."

Cho has become one of the hottest names in standup with her pull-no-punches approach to such topics as sex, politics, sex, race relations, sex, family, and sex.

Raunchy, yes, but not senselessly so, she insists.

"My show is beautiful," she continues. "It's all about beauty and sexuality."

She can trace the origins of the show to a radio interview she did a couple of years ago, in which the DJ asked her an odd question: What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and you were beautiful?

What he meant was: what if Cho were suddenly blond, blue-eyed and petite, instead of Asian and a bit pudgy?

Cho was disgusted by the question.

"His point was, if you're not skinny and blond you're not beautiful. It's really sad if that's your idea of beauty. My show is a statement against that. I am beautiful."

It has taken Cho a long time, with many painful pitfalls along the way, to say with confidence that she is beautiful.

In the early 1990s, while starring in the ABC sitcom All American Girl, Cho reportedly developed a serious eating disorder after network executives criticized the roundness of her face. She starved herself to the point of kidney failure.

She had been extremely self-conscious of her appearance her whole life, and the unforgiving TV cameras (notorious for adding 10 pounds) exacerbated Cho's deep-rooted insecurities.

"I was a quiet, fat, shy girl," she recalls. "Painfully shy. When you're fat you feel totally invisible, which is weird because there's so much of you to see. But nobody looks at you when you're fat."

Despite her shyness, Cho summoned the courage to go to the one place where she knew people would not ignore her: the stage.

She had always been funny (perhaps genetically so, since her father wrote joke books in Korean), and she wanted people to notice.

"When I first started doing comedy, it was amazing because people actually listened to me," she recalls. "Finally I had power. When I'm performing, it feels right to me. I'm better off as a person."

Which leads back to the title of her travelling show, Beautiful.

Bawdy as her comedy may be, the underlying message is that beauty is found in all people, of all shapes and sizes and colours.

So if you're shocked by her tale of the _____ that she applied to her _____, try to look for the deeper philosophical meaning behind it.

"Honesty and the truth are beautiful things," she says. "Censoring myself would be wrong. This is about empowering myself, and empowering the audience."