I felt, once again, as I did when I was 17 and I first saw her perform at the University of Hartford in CT, that private bond you share with an old friend. No matter how far from the stage, no matter how crummy your seat, Cho has a way of speaking straight to you. The rest of the audience seemed to feel the same. Her jokes about the schlep out to Fire Island, commenting that all the gay resorts are the hardest to get to, earned laughs of commiseration. If there were any holdouts left to win over, she earned their trust early on with her astute observation that straight people seemed to be clogging up the island. I looked over at my boyfriend, a bit guilty of that one.
What I especially enjoy about Margaret Cho is her ability to be both hot shit and a total nobody at the same time. She walked out onstage and it was immediately clear from the tenor of the applause and the excitement in the room that she is very dear to this audience. One of her first courses of action then was to talk about how she is dealing with age, not by way of plastic surgery, but by getting new tattoos so that, instead of focusing on new wrinkles, people will simply say, “Hmm… what happened to that turtle?”
I remember her employing a similar tactic when I first saw her in 2002. She came out in stilettos and then, moments into her set took them off because they were so uncomfortable. This delighted the frat-boy audience that attended that show and it especially delighted me. I didn’t know a woman could do that! Just… take off her heels while doing stand-up simply because she felt like it! There was an extraordinary defiance and a real charm that came through her when she took off those heels. That was the moment when I first “met” Margaret Cho. The simple act had the effect, quite literally, of bringing her onto our level.
In her Cherry Grove show, she was dressed very casually and had much less of the need to prove that I saw in her ten years ago. She seems to have a deeper understanding of why audiences love her and she appears to be less at war with her body. What has remained over the years is her unique ability to find comedy in every shade of “outsider-dom” that she has experienced: as a Korean-American in a hostile school cafeteria, as a bisexual navigating the demands of her sex “addiction,” and as a woman struggling to feel beautiful, while still eating food.
She had the gays laughing uproariously when she pointed out that if they had Grindr turned on, their phones would implode on Fire Island. I was ahead of that one, but she had me laughing when she unexpectedly followed with, “The closest thing [lesbians] have to Grindr is the animal rescue.”
Cho also delighted with her signature “too-much-information” brand of humor, confessing to her resumé of sexually transmitted maladies: “People ask me,” and for this she employs a mockingly sensitive tone of voice, “‘What do you think of this HPV vaccine?'” She then scoffs, “They milked my pussy for that vaccine, you know, like a cobra.”
After a few years of my own dalliances… and of worrying every time, there is no better balm for the formerly-single-girl’s soul than a pitch-perfect STI joke. I was appreciative.
Cho can really work a room. She began her set with lots of material tailored to her gay male fans. Just when I began to assume she was pandering and had deserted me, she segued into some really astute vagina humor and a crowd-silencing reference to her recent abortion. I mean… if Cho’s not gonna open up about her recent abortion to a packed audience of men, who is going to?
At the end of the evening, having bared her soul, covering topics as diverse as the obligatory eruptive poop story (another Cho staple) to a deliciously painful tale of having dug a “perfectly good” painkiller pill out of her own vomit, she then proceeded to take off most of her clothes to demonstrate a bodily trick she could perform with her nifty new tattoos.
For a relatively well-behaved, suburban white girl such as myself, Cho continues to serve as a reminder that rule-breaking is an option. She is gross. She is candid. She is sad. She is quick and she keeps it real. We need Margaret Cho and we are lucky to have her.
To check out Cho’s fantastic new show Mother, visit MargaretCho.com for tour cities and dates!
