Margaret Cho gives it good at Humphreys
by Renee Westbrook
San Diego Local Music Examiner

Margaret Cho can’t help but be brutally honest. It’s her nature. But there’s something else about her the audience clung to Friday night at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay; something that keeps gay, straight, young and old people of all races coming back for more.

It’s generosity.

Whether she’s talking about “spit roasting”, a sexual act that involves at least three people or her feminine nether regions being the site of Oprah’s newest school, Cho exudes generosity.

Opener John Roberts is no stranger to that artistic altruism. Dressed like a gay Gallagher, his multi-character Carrot Top with wig props routine was just enough to get the audience in gear. Looking a bit worn when she took the stage, she kicked off the show talking about the difficulties of being a competitor on “Dancing With The Stars”, a bit that wouldn’t be complete without the voice of her mother chiming in, “Ohhhh, it so haaaaaaaaaard.”

Sex and politics are major staples of her act. She touched on gays in the military and Proposition 8 then offered the audience a glimpse of her many “fellationships” and sexcapades including accidentally sexting Mrs. Cho.

Probably the most poignant bit of the night came when she spoke about her grandfather, a man she says suffered disfiguring facial burns when he rescued his adoptive children from a burning building.

Grandpa was her biggest fan. The cancellation of her 1994 sitcom “All American Girl” took a toll on him and he died shortly thereafter. In true Cho fashion, that moment went from poignant to gut busting funny when she told the story of how at Grandpa’s funeral several of his grief-stricken girlfriends jumped into the casket with him.

Because it’s still early on in the tour and the act has not quite settled into its groove, songs from her musical comedy CD “Cho Dependent” gave the unsteady show a much needed balance.

By far the highlight of the evening was Cho singing the song about the human male genitalia. She brought in the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus to sing backup and with a ton of heaping liberality shared her dance partner Louis van Amstel with the audience.

Cho is not a woe-is-me kind of comedian. She’s the kind whose entire show subtext simply offers this: I
stand before you fearless and steady, anchored in my experiences, ready and willing to share with you exactly who I am.

You may wince and cringe at the overt vulgarities, but once acclimated you’ll double over with laughter and be grateful you spent an hour and a half accepting her generosity.

Margaret Cho at the Grove of Anaheim Last Night
by Ali Lerman
OC Weekly

The Hype: Gays and straights packed the house and laughed in perfect harmony last night at Margaret Cho’s “Cho Dependent” comedy show at the Grove of Anaheim. For a Thursday “school night” the size of the crowd was pretty impressive. Then again, this is fast talking dirty girl Margaret Cho we’re talking about. And last time I checked, she’s pretty impressive herself (If you missed the show, you can always catch Margaret on TV: she’ in this season’s Dancing with the Stars and Drop Dead Diva.)

The Show: Opening the show was tour mate John Roberts and his array of wigs that all came complete with impressions. And the way he moved those hips while singing a song of his own? Well, he makes a straight girl wish she was a gay man.

Speaking of … The audience was hooting and hollering for the 41-year-old headliner Margaret Cho as she admitted she has a goal of her own. The goal is to keep having sex. Spoken as only Margaret could put it, “I want to be so old that when I’m fucking and I ask my name it’s because I really need to know my name!” I guess everyone needs a goal. ‘

With a sharp tongue and amazing stage presence, Margaret touched on subjects like politics, strip clubs, religion, and actually shitting her pants a couple of weeks ago. Hey, no one said she was lady like–but maybe that’s what draws you in to her. It was like having a conversation with Margaret Cho; I literally became “Cho Dependent” on her every word and couldn’t wait to hear what she would say next.

Showcasing music from her album also named Cho Dependent, Margaret belted out tunes like the hysterical “My Dick,” “I’m Sorry,” and a duet with John Roberts (done while impersonating their moms) called, “My Puss.”

Laughing tears came out of my eyes, it was so great. Not wanting to only shock the crowd with filthy songs and jokes, Cho’s Dancing with the Stars partner Louis van Amstel surprised and then dazzled the crowd while spinning across the floor with prop wings from DWTS, which the judges hated by the way. But not this crowd. They loved every minute of it. I

The Crowd: A lot of laughs mixed with the sounds of clapping along to parody singing. While the show was two hours in length, the crowd remained responsive and eager to hear the next bit of raunch to come out of Margaret’s mouth the whole time.

Overheard: “I can’t wait to check out that ‘Grinder’ app she was talking about for my phone!” Sorry folks, you just had to be there.

Margaret Cho takes to The Pearl (and DWTS) stages
By Don Chareunsy
Las Vegas Sun

There’s not a lot to say about a Margaret Cho standup show when the majority of the content focuses on male genitalia and fecal matter, clinical terms that aren’t used in Cho’s live show, and one works for a company in which profanity is verboten, except sparingly in Las Vegas Weekly.

The Korean American comedienne, a longtime favorite since I’m the One That I Want and seeing her live for the first time in Long Beach, Calif., in the late 1990s, took to the stage with her Cho Independent Tour stop at The Pearl in the Palms on Friday night, three nights before her debut in the cast of 12 celebrities on Season 11 of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars.

Cho’s first topic was DWTS, in which she praised her professional dance partner Louis Van Amstel and talked about her strategy for winning. She’s said it’s OK if she goes home the first week, but she’s going to showcase her showgirl style and stripper moves (“I’m magic on the pole.”) And if that doesn’t work? “I’m going to cannibalize the others! I’m going to go all G.I. Jane and shave my head!” (Many pundits had Bristol Palin or her getting the ax first, but they were safe in last night’s results show.)

Other topics included olive oil, for vocal chords, that eventually exits the body; Grinder (Google it if you must); Prop. 8 in California outlawing gay marriage; living part time in the Atlanta area; combating homophobia with The Advocate, Italian Men’s Vogue and gay porn; sending sexy messages via texting (sexting) that inadvertently are delivered to Mom; Asian Girls Gone Wild (“They aren’t studying, and they are wearing shoes in the house!”); stoners as the true Christians and Good Samaritans; and, of course, her mother, an impression in broken English that fans love and that Cho does out of love and admiration for her mother.

What was different from previous standup performances was the incorporation of songs from Cho Dependent, her first album of comedy and music released last month. Cho has a strong and clear voice, and it worked well with her acoustic guitar work and topics about killing someone, female genitalia (see the paragraph below) and male genitalia in the three songs she performed Friday night. The Las Vegas Men’s Chorus accompanied her in the final song, her finale before an encore, which was another song from the album.

John Roberts served as the evening’s 15-minute opening act consisting mostly of impressions in various wigs. His impression of a female porn star received the biggest laughs, and he returned to sing, in arguably the evening’s highlight, a song about female genitalia with Cho as Mrs. Cho and he as his Jewish mother Margie.

Check out my family friendly interview with Cho posted last week, in which she discusses her new album, Drop Dead Diva, gay marriage and living in L.A. and Atlanta.

Cho competes in Week 2 of DWTS with Van Amstel on Monday.

Margaret Cho at Dodge Theatre: Crass Comedy for a Local Cause
by Niki D’Andrea
Phoenix New Times

Poop jokes will never get old, and they will never die. But they may never be more explosive and fresh than they were in the hands of comedian Margaret Cho, during her performance at Dodge Theatre on Saturday night.

But even better than the bowel howlers, the Korean mother imitations, and the smattering of songs was the way she made a political statement without saying much. She briefly talked about the Arizona boycott and immigration rights, but her bigger statement was donating all the proceeds from her Phoenix show to Puente and Tonatierra, two local immigration rights groups.

And she kept the audience at Dodge Theatre cracking up all the way. Not just laughing, but squealing, howling, snorting, eyes-watering, cheeks-hurtin’, ribs-achin,’”oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-she-just-said-that” laughing.

Margaret Cho’s fans are not uptight. They’re not afraid to laugh at anal sex jokes or cheer when she emulates giving a blow job. Cho does have an audience of open-minded straight people, but the gay community has made her one of its icons.

Before the show, a large, Latin man behind me turned to his friend and said, “Girl, if she comes walking down this aisle, I’m ripping off this vest and throwing myself at her.”

We lost count of the crap jokes, but one that really stood out for us was when she suddenly said, “Last week, I shit my pants.” She busted out laughing before describing the wayward turd in myriad ways, from “It was shaped like Indonesia” to “It made two-humps in my pants, like a Camel.”

She said she’d been feeling cocky that day. “Because when you’re really confident, that’s when you will shit your pants.”

Cho also invoked her mother several times, once imitating her mom trying to set up one of her friends. “This man is not good-looking,” Cho said in her mother’s voice. “But he’s very tall, so his face is reeaally far away.”

On a less humorous note, Cho announced she was donating the proceeds from her show to Puente and Tonatierra. “A lot of people are saying ‘Boycott Phoenix.’ I still wanted to come, and I decided it could benefit a good cause,” she said. “This country was built by immigrants, for immigrants, and everybody is welcome.”

After much applause, she sang a few songs from her music album Cho Dependent, and was joined onstage by opening act John Roberts for “My Puss,” a riotous back-and-forth (sample lyric: “My puss, is fine so I flaunt it/Your puss, is so old that it’s haunted”).

Her final number, after 90 minutes onstage, was the song “Your Dick,” which included a surprise appearance from the Phoenix Metropolitan Men’s Chorus. Sixty men in formal black tuxes, all swaying side to side and singing behind Cho (herself wearing a glittery silver dress with a glittery red neckline), seemed oddly epic.

After the show, Cho took photos with the chorus and did a meet and greet with about 20 lucky fans — and us. We asked about her tattoos (she has several large designs all over her body), and got a brief tour of her sleeves.

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.