Margaret Cho’s focus on toilet parts radiantly funny
by Adrian Mack
The Vancouver Straight

Margaret Cho’s performance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday was so bracingly filthy that you wondered if people were cheering for the punch lines or the sheer nastiness of it all.

Either way, it was a good night for the veteran comedian, who’s been hitting the road to support her first album of music, Cho Dependent.

Cho gave us three numbers between all the standup, with a Carl Newman cowrite called “Your Dick” being the best, and a rap song called “My Puss”—delivered in her mom’s exaggerated accent—easily the most scabrous. Along with her mother’s puss, Cho’s spoken material was strongly focused on her own toilet parts, most memorably in the first couple minutes of the show, when she explained why she farts a “fine mist” of extra virgin olive oil these days.

We were all pretty intimate with Cho’s ass by the end of the night. She spoke at length about her “shy hole”, her newfound taste for anal, and her desire to co-opt the end-to-end gay strategy known as “the spit roast”. “But I’m Korean,” she frowned, “and we like barbecue.”

There were digressions into cock, California’s Prop 8, queefs, white people, geriatric strippers, sperm donors, sexting her mom by accident, cock, cock, more cock, and—being that this was Vancouver—her passion for weed. “Last time I was here,” she said, “I got so fucking stoned that I bought $5,000 worth of yoga gear.”

One of her best bits was about living as a bisexual Asian in super-white Peachtree City, Georgia, for the half of the year she spends shooting Drop Dead Diva. “It’s weird when your apartment is the ghetto, the gay neighbourhood, and Chinatown,” she said. “It’s a lot of pressure.”

Cho scored a lot of points off of stereotypes, noting that “the only time Koreans show emotion is when someone either dies or shoplifts”, or launching into ludicrously broad (and gut-busting) caricatures of her own family. It’s not exactly fresh, but Cho is too smooth and radiantly funny for anybody to care, and it’s odd how she manages to be so cheerfully gross without really coming off as terribly offensive, even when she’s fantasizing about sleep-raping a guy and sucking up his junk “like a jello shot”.

More to the point, it’s just nice to have somebody advocating for those of us who combine a pornographic imagination with simple ambitions. There probably wasn’t anybody in the theatre who didn’t relate when Cho said, “You know, I’m 41, and my goal in life is to just keep getting fucked.”

Comedy review: Margaret Cho adds maturity — and musical comedy — to stand-up act in Portland
by Lee Williams
The Oregonian

She may be making her first foray into musical comedy, but Margaret Cho already knows how to sell a song.

And launch a new tour.

Cho kicked off her latest national concert tour, “Cho Dependent,” to a nearly sold-out crowd at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday night.

This week she also released the “Cho Dependent” companion album, a collection of ditties Cho co-composed with artists ranging from musicians Tegan and Sara and Ani DiFranco to fellow comic Tommy Chong.

Working the stage in micro-mini denim shorts and a sleeveless top that exposed her recent tapestry of tattoos (she has said they now cover 20 percent of her body), Cho sprinkled performances of four songs throughout her hundred-minute show, hitting their humorous notes with some surprising vocal chops and musical craftsmanship.

“I’m Sorry,” a grisly little alt-country twanger was even funnier and grislier after Cho recounted the song’s inspiration: She’d Google’d an old flame she wanted to rekindle, only to find out he’d murdered his wife. (Watch the “I’m Sorry” video.)

An electro-rap tune delivered as a duet with Cho’s opening act John Roberts, and a ballad she sang while strumming acoustic guitar, hit their marks as well. Like many songs on the album, their titles can’t be said here.

But it was halfway through her set, during a torch song dedicated to male genitalia, when Cho got some nifty, additional back-up.

The curtain behind her lifted revealing the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, a surprising, tuxedoed choral accompaniment that seemed both sweet and entirely appropriate to the number, and to her show. Cho has long been a spokesperson for gay and lesbian issues.

The meat and potatoes of her concerts is still her stand-up. The material, her paced delivery, and Cho’s amazing facial contortions, were where she shined most on Thursday.

Unlike during her election-year tours, politics took a bit of a back seat, though Cho got in a few barbs about California’s Proposition 8

Her biggest riffs remained current events, body image and gay culture. Cho’s been trying to make headway at her gym in Peachtree City, Ga., she explained, the Atlanta suburb where her girl-powered Lifetime comedy “Drop Dead Diva” shoots. To the gym’s stacks of conservative Focus on Family magazines, Cho says she’s added gay reading staples The Advocate magazine and Italian Men’s Vogue.

And a huge theme was sex: procuring sex now that she’s in her 40s, as opposed to her 20s, when she said all she had to do was pretend she didn’t speak English; imagining sex during her living-assisted years; her own perils with sexting; to visiting a strip club that employs elderly strippers and serves steaks. (”What kind of wine goes with that?” she pondered.)

In other words, vintage Cho. This was the chance to see and hear an already drop-dead funny diva growing, flexing new musical muscle, and fearlessly mature.