Margaret Cho shocks, entertains Ryman crowd

By KEVIN NANCE
Staff Writer

''I am widely known to be a highly inappropriate person,'' comedian Margaret Cho confided late in her uproarious set last night at the Ryman Auditorium. ''Which makes me a very unpopular dinner guest.''

She impersonated the aghast person sitting next to her at dinner saying, ''Don't go there!'' Her response: ''I live there.''

You better believe she does. Cho's comedy has always turned on the mortifications of the flesh — sex, self-image, eating disorders, the messiness of childbirth, the allure of plastic surgery — and she's now, if anything, franker and more X-rated about those things than ever. A cornerstone of her routine last night, for example, was an extended anecdote about being caught in her car while seized by the need to perform a particular bodily function. It was queasy, uncomfortable stuff — in part because it related to her by-now-familiar theme of self-reproach because of her weight — and all the more hilarious because of its liberating chutzpah. Giggling away, you shake your head in wonder: Who would tell such a story about herself, even for laughs?

Margaret Cho, that's who. She is a woman who revels in saying absolutely anything, even if much of it is guaranteed to tick off anyone even a few steps to the right of center. (With her bird-flipping jabs at homophobes, racists, misogynists, pro-lifers and enthusiasts for the public display of the Ten Commandments, she makes Al Franken and Michael Moore look like Rush Limbaugh.)

Not that her audience at the Ryman was offended in the slightest. Cho was a heroine to this left-leaning bunch, which included the largest gay and lesbian contingent I've ever seen at a public performance in Nashville; the next time there's a need to mobilize the electorate, the gay community could do worse than bring in Cho to whip up the crowd.

She gets away with all of her blue material, of course, by virtue of her rubberized face — which can go long stretches in utter deadpan, then erupt in alternating waves of outrage and humiliation — and the sheer confidence of her extraordinarily leisurely comic timing. Nobody stretches out a joke longer or has more elongated pauses, because nobody else has the same skill at making an audience savor the punch line well before she delivers it.

Yes, there's something sad in Margaret Cho, something hurt, maybe even something tragic. But she doesn't give you time to dwell on it. You're too busy laughing.