Dancing With the Stars said no, but Chicago said yes when Margaret Cho made a pit stop at the Chicago Theatre just one week after getting dismissed from the reality show. Looking fit and damn near radiant, the former sitcom star who gained critical acclaim for her one-woman show I’m the One That I Want back in 2000 has returned, raunchier than ever even as she’s mellowed on the in-your-face-pro-self-esteem rants that marked her earlier work.

Her new show, Cho Dependent, is smoother, more irreverent and decidedly more light-hearted than her mid-2000s shows Assassin and Revolution. In place of musings on body image, the new show debuts Margaret Cho the singer with an armory of songs from her recently released comedy album, also titled Cho Dependent, ranging from a country ballad inspired by a real-life writer on her former sitcom who killed his wife and stuffed her in the attic until she was partially mummified to a parody of Mickey Avalon’s “My Dick” performed with opener John Roberts. It’s hard to see Cho on stage impersonating her own mother while rapping “My pus, tight like a paper cut. Your pus, fishy like a halibut” without thinking that’s the girl we know and love.

Aside from the intermittent song and seemingly mitigated anger levels, Cho Dependent still hits the topics she’s best known for—sex, race relations, gay rights, religion, often simultaneously. She made an informal PSA to closeted gays trying to conform to homophobic church values that “no matter how much you love the Lord, you will never love him as much as you love cock. No hymn will ever sound as good to you as the sound of balls slapping on your neck.”

Cho Dependent does raise a few eyebrows. While the show is abundantly clear on Cho’s stance as an LGBT advocate, it leaves a number of questions about Cho’s personal bedroom life. Casting off the label “bisexual” because she says it’s too limiting, Cho calls herself gay in the show and states that she is predominantly attracted to transgender people, but never says anything about how that fits into her seven-year marriage to a straight, biological male.

It’s probably a good thing that Cho Dependent leaves us wanting more answers, more songs, more razor-sharp quips that cut through close-minded bullshit. That’s music to our ears.