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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

Margaret Cho gave me some of her time recently to discuss the August 24th release of her new album Cho Dependent. News Flash: Girlfriend can sing, and really really well. The thirteen songs here cut across quite a few genres; hip hop, girl group, country music, rock & roll, singer-songwriter, dance-pop. Margaret enlisted a stellar group of compadres to help write and perform the tunes — Ben Lee, Tommy Chong, Tegan & Sara, Grant Lee Phillips, Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Fiona Apple, Brendan Benson, Garrison Star, Patty Griffin, Jon Brion, Meghan Toohey, Diana Yanez and Kurt Hall. Rachael Yamagata also appears on a hidden Easter Egg track.

Cho had been wanting to do something like this for a long time. “I wanted to create a comedy album with really great music that would endure beyond the jokes, so the songs would have some value after the fact… something that was not just comedy music but also great music.” Admitting she needed some help in the composition department, she explained, “… I’m a musician but I am not a great composer, so I don’t really know how to put notes together. I just enlisted people I know who did do that really well and those happen to be some of the greatest musicians out there.”

Everyone she approached was interested in the project and some (Ani DiFranco, Grant Lee Phillips, John Brion) were long time friends. “It was the desire for me to do something with comedy that is more expansive and I’m really excited, I think all comedians want to be musicians and I think all musicians want to be comedians. It’s a natural desire and affection that they have for one another so this was a wonderful manifestation of that desire and it was really great.”

Personally I love the whole record and foresee it living on my CD player for quite some time. I admitted to Margaret that for me, the stand-out track (pun intended) was “Your Dick.” It recalls the best of 60’s girl group records with a lavish, glittery, dreamy Righteous Brothers-y production. The lyrics include lines like “your dick, your dick splits the wheat from the chaff, its like a giraffe – especially the neck part” and winds up to a big finish (pun intended, again). “Oh that’s a good one, it was quite a production,” Margaret told me. “That one I wrote with Karl Newman from the New Pornographers, and it was produced so beautifully by Ben Lee.”

She plans to mix live performances of the songs along with stand up comedy on a three month tour of the U.S. and Canada starting in late August. “I’m kind of into the process of deciding what it will sound like live. Ultimately I’m doing a stand up tour – I don’t want to jump out of being a stand up comedian, that would be really jarring for me so I really think it’s still comedy…Hopefully some of the people who wrote songs and performed songs with me will do it on the road.” She is quite adamant about maintaining the integrity of the recording, “… So I’ll probably do it to track or have a very small band.”

For “Baby I’m With The Band,” a track written and performed with Brendan Benson, Cho recently shot a video at Bonnaroo. She issued an open invitation to all the musicians at the festival to participate in cameos. “Quite a lot of people jumped into it. I had the Gossip in there and of course Brendan Benson, and Jack White did something and Conan O’Brien did something and OK Go was in it. We did a big thing with GWAR, who I love.”

One of the songs on the record, “I’m Sorry,” is a country ballad about a classic country music subject: murder. The tune is actually based on a true story from Cho’s life, or more accurately, her past life. “When I was very young and I was doing the television show All American Girl, I really fell in love with one of the writers on the show and he did not like me back. It was not a good thing, it was an awful situation like when you have a crush on somebody and they don’t care, and it’s horrible.” She held a torch for 17 years, one of those ‘what if” situations we all have tucked away. “I always had him somewhere in my heart, like I think when you’re really young you sometimes idealize a person and I really loved this guy. But I never thought to find him because I was sure that he was married and living in a lighthouse somewhere with five kids and super successful — I just envisioned this perfect life for him.”

When she turned 40, Cho decided she would look her old crush up and just see where he was and what he was doing. As one does. “…So I googled him and his name came up and it said American screenwriter / producer and worked on All American Girl with Margaret Cho, and in 2007 was convicted of the murder of his wife. He bludgeoned her to death and then stuffed her body in the attic of their house for a month until it had partially mummified… Finding this out I was really destroyed by it — it was a very complicated thing because, OK, it could have been me but then it couldn’t have even been me — it was so awful and I felt so bad for this woman that he killed and I felt so awful for her family.” In a catharsis of sorts, Cho decided to write a song about the pure selfishness of domestic violence, an all too common topic in country music.

Cho also noted that singers like Billie Holiday and Etta James were famed for this theme in their music, “You would consider these women very powerful people but their songs are often about dealing with domestic violence and their acquiescence to it… Sometimes the only way that we can endure some of the darkness in life is through a very dark sense of humor and so it was me trying to exercise some kind of control over what happened.” She called the song “I’m Sorry,” “…because he never said he was sorry. Because all these people do not say that they’re sorry when they commit these crimes and commit them in the name of loving somebody, it’s really just disgusting to me. So the song turned out to be very much a kind of classic murder ballad, you know, it’s a very sort of Americana staple of country music. I’m proud of the song, something that came out of it that was creative and helped me deal with the very complicated emotions that I had towards this person and this situation.”

As we spoke, Cho was in the process of wrapping up the second season of Drop Dead Diva, the hit Lifetime TV show she co-stars in with Brooke Elliott. The show has been described by creator Josh Berman as “a cross between Freaky Friday and Heaven Can Wait.” Cho plays Teri Lee, the crackerjack legal assistant to attorney Jane Bingum. Teri is about to be revealed as a private eye, confided Cho. “It’s a lot of fun.” A recent episode had her introducing her family — mother and cousin — “wonderfully played by Aaron Yoo who’s a great Korean American actor, and Emily Kuroda, who’s awesome.” The episode included a helicopter, laughs Cho, “so it was these Korean people and a helicopter – it was real M.A.S.H.”

She also enjoys spending tine in Atlanta, where the show tapes. “I have a good time here, I have a lot of friends here now, it’s my second year here… it’s different to live in the South, it’s a different feeling. Although Atlanta itself is a quite liberal, it’s a very queer city. It’s always called the San Francisco of the south, because it is quite gay, and the neighborhood that I live in is really gay.”

Cho’s home base is L.A. and she grew up in the Bay Area, where her father had a bookstore near Polk Street. “It was in the early 80’s so there was a lot of punk rock and goth, the very beginnings of goth.” And lots and lots of tattoos. “I always wanted to be tattooed,” says Cho, who now has them pretty much everywhere. “I don’t think I can get anymore because I don’t have any space. It’s hard if you’re an actor, I can’t get them on my arm anymore and I can’t get them on my legs, so I don’t know where to go.” Ed Hardy was one of the artists who did some of her early tattoos, as well as Kat Von D, Chris O’Donnell, Mike Davis, and Nathan Kostechko.

We finished up our conversation by grousing about attitudes towards gay marriage and the Gulf Oil Spill. Regarding gay marriage, Cho is at a loss. “I don’t understand why people feel that they can dictate what is equality — to me it’s so cut and dried, I don’t understand what the problem is that people have with gay marriage. I just don’t understand why this needs to be fought over because it seems so plain…. it’s very frustrating.” I asked her why she thought Americans, for the most part, seem so subdued in their anger about the oil spill. “If gays were involved people would be angry, if the ocean was trying to marry another ocean, people would be angry, but now — nobody cares. Its really not discussed, it’s a major tragedy, it’s the worst environmental tragedy in history, and so I don’t know why people are not enraged about this. I don’t get it… I talk about it a lot, in my work, I’m so furious. The best thing that we can do is discuss it and talk about it and write about it, and not let it go, because I think so much time is spent on things that don’t matter, and this is something that really really matters.”

*Note: The lyric referenced in the title of this piece, “I’m a friggin’ rockstar superhero bitch” comes from “Captain Cameltoe,” Cho’s collaboration with Ani DiFranco on Cho Dependent

Margaret Cho, “Cho Dependent” (August 24th)

When it was revealed late last year that Comedienne and actress Margaret Cho was set to release an album I, like I’m sure many, figured it’d feature her brilliant stand-up instead we get 13 fully produced musical tracks. “Cho Dependent” is filled with witty and funny lyrics as well as delicious vocals and catchy hooks. The album was co-written by the comedian herself and features collaborations with everyone from Fiona Apple to Patty Griffin, Grant Lee Phillips, Ben Lee and Ani DiFranco among others. Her brilliance is showcased best in tracks like “Your Dick” a ballad that pays homage to a man’s southern region while the lyrics are blunt the melody is sweet and the harmonization is lovely enough to momentarily make you forget you’re listening to a comedic album, that is until the falsetto comes in proclaiming “I like your balls too.” The album tackles many issues such as “Lice,” “Calling In Stoned” and “Enemies.” If there’s one thing you’ll soon come to learn while listening to this album is that, “you can’t break up with [her]…[she’s] Margaret Fucking Cho!”

By MARY McNAMARA, Television Critic

The press material for Lifetime’s new comedy “Drop Dead Diva” contains a lot of accolades from “women’s groups” in which terms like “role model” and “grab your girlfriends” appear with alarming frequency — as if the publicity department were bracing critics for a show that should be viewed through a political or genre framework instead of simply as, you know, a television show anyone might enjoy. (The term “role model” especially tolls in a critic’s ear with as much anticipatory delight as Poe’s funeral iron bells.)

None of which was necessary, as “Drop Dead Diva” is a lot of fun to watch, with the added bonus of introducing TV audiences to Brooke Elliott, a stage actress with fabulous comic timing and enormous dramatic flexibility.

Oh, and she weighs a bit more than 100 pounds, which may explain all that “women’s group” nonsense.

Created by Josh Berman, who has written for “CSI” and “Bones,” “Drop Dead Diva” answers the age old question: What would happen if a dippy but beautiful woman woke up one morning with a brilliant mind but a dumpy body? OK, maybe it’s not an age-old question, but it certainly is an interesting twist on the rather worn pretty-and-witless-meets-schlubby-and-smart-narrative that fuels so much of chick lit.

All this and heaven too. “Drop Dead Diva” opens with two very different women about to meet their doom. Jane (Elliott) is a driven drudge of a lawyer who wears brooches and finds what little joy she experiences in work and carbs. Lots of carbs.

Deb, played by Brooke D’Orsay, meanwhile, is a tight-bodied empty-headed model-actress (guess which one is blond; go ahead, guess) on her way to audition for a job Vanna White made famous.

Both are tragically killed, and we meet up with Deb as she enters the Great Sorting Room in the Sky, where Fred (Ben Feldman), her celestial concierge, informs her that though she has never done an evil deed, she has neither done a good one, making her his first “zero, zero.” Stung, she manages to get sent back to Earth, but via the tragically imperfect body of Jane.

With a setup like this, it would be very easy to fall into a veritable showcase of sexism — How dumb was Deb? How fat is Jane? — but Berman produces a deft juggling trick of heart and humor, balancing Deb’s shallowness with some solid common sense and Jane’s inadequate self-esteem with kindness and legal brilliance.

Almost impossibly, Elliott manages to embody both personalities in a way that, far from some tedious “Inside the Actor’s Studio” lesson in character assimilation, is just delightful to watch. She is aided in this wacky scenario by a serviceable if predictable diagnosis of semi-amnesia and, more important, by Margaret Cho as Jane’s trusty assistant, Teri, and April Bowlby as Deb’s equally shallow but still loyal best friend, Stacy. Both hit all the necessary double-takes and are-you-crazy moments with just the right dramatic frothiness and keep things tethered, if loosely, to the recognizable world.

There’s a bunch of cute guys, of course: Fred has been demoted to guardian angel and gets a job at Jane’s firm so he can keep tabs on his runaway soul. Deb had a boyfriend, Grayson (Jackson Hurst), who has also, as luck and narrative need would have it, just joined the staff (the economic slowdown has not, apparently, hit this portion of Los Angeles).

Despite Deb’s self-centered zero, zero status, Grayson appears to be a peach of a guy, devastated by his girlfriend’s death, but Deb is convinced he wouldn’t look at her twice now that she’s Jane. There’s a scheming colleague, Kim (Kate Levering), a possibly sleazy boss (Josh Stamberg) and a host of upcoming guest stars (Rosie O’Donnell, Paula Abdul). But mostly there’s just Jane, a one-woman, two-woman show, trying to figure out how to accessorize her new life, which comes complete with sugar cravings and a job that requires she think about someone besides herself for two minutes.

If you were of a mind, you could concentrate on all the rather obvious plot devices and general silliness — a female client transformed by a single make-over — and pick “Drop Dead Diva” to death. But why?

Certainly, the show falls more in the fun category than the brilliant, and it’s not going to change television as we know it, but with any luck, it will remind us not to take everything, including television shows, so darn seriously. There is joy to be had in a doughnut, beauty can radiate from a face not made entirely of cheekbones and Botox, but that’s not the point. Deb’s zero, zero has nothing to do with looks but with deeds, and in its own light-hearted and sentimental way, that is what “Drop Dead Diva” makes clear. Not so much that beauty (yawn) comes from within, but that you actually have to do something to put it there.

On second thought, it may indeed change television as we know it.

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: July 9, 2009

Someone heard the old line about a thin woman trapped in a fat woman’s body and took it literally. In “Drop Dead Diva,” a Lifetime series that begins on Sunday, an aspiring model and airhead named Deb (Brooke D’Orsay) dies in a car crash and is transported — through a bungled act of divine intervention — to the body of a recently deceased lawyer, Jane (Brooke Elliott), who is smart, fat and frumpy.

The trading-places formula is put to use here in a weight-conscious comedy, a “Freaky Friday” mind-body exchange that measures the eternal contest between brains and beauty by the pound.

Deb, trapped in a Lane Bryant physique, doesn’t lose her own shallow, bubbly personality. When Deb awakens in a hospital bed and discovers that her once-taut stomach is now a pillowy protrusion of flab, she shrieks at her guardian angel, “You sent me to hell?” But she also assumes Jane’s high-powered brain and legal expertise. Deb discovers that while she now craves doughnuts and cheese dip, her mind also savors a complicated and compelling legal case. Basically she thinks like Elle in “Legally Blonde,” only she looks like Camryn Manheim on “The Practice.”

And while the presumption that a woman can be either brainy or beautiful, or in this case, good or thin, but not both, is a bit primitive, the series has humor and charm beneath its facile message, in large part (no disrespect intended) to a subtle, winning performance by Ms. Elliott.

It’s gotten harder than ever to find an imperfect heroine in a series who is actually flawed. More than ever these days, television suffers from casting dysmorphia; it repeatedly takes a slovenly, gluttonous, character and casts an exquisitely groomed, Pilates-toned actress in the part.

One of the running jokes of both “30 Rock” and “The New Adventures of Old Christine” is that the characters played by Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are disarmingly sloppy, out of shape and addicted to junk food — and wine, in the case of Ms. Louis-Dreyfus. It’s a strain when both actresses are so petite, pretty and fit.

Debra Messing may have started the trompe l’oeil trend in “Will & Grace,” since she too was a whippet-thin actress playing a slovenly overeater. But the hypocrisy grows ever more insulting — a cognitive diss. Even TNT, which takes pride in badly behaved heroines — a slatternly sot on “Saving Grace,” a sweetsaholic on “The Closer” — assigns those roles to improbably slender, well-preserved actresses like Holly Hunter and Kyra Sedgwick.

And when a comedy does feature a female lead who is not conventionally pretty, that becomes the raison d’être of the series, as in “Ugly Betty.”

Network executives have concluded, perhaps not unreasonably, that audiences don’t really want television characters that are too true to life. “Roseanne” was a huge hit and lasted nine years, but it didn’t spark a stampede for plus-size actresses. Neither did “Less Than Perfect,” which starred a larger-than-usual actress, Sara Rue, and a venti-size sidekick, Sherri Shepherd. Ms. Manheim won Emmys on “The Practice” and “The Ghost Whisperer,” without inspiring many imitators.

Reality shows, on the other hand, feast on fat people. “The Biggest Loser” proved there was an appetite for weight-loss competitions, and now imitations abound. Oxygen has the latest: “Dance Your Ass Off,” in which chubby contestants shed weight by dancing. (Their scores are based on both their footwork and how many pounds they’ve lost.) This month Fox will present a “Bachelor”-like dating reality show for ordinary, heavyset people called “More to Love”; there is no weight loss requirement to winning a rose.

About two-thirds of Americans are overweight, many of them dangerously so. But television reflects a funhouse mirror image of society; sitcoms and dramas hold out impossibly narrow standards of beauty, while reality shows seek out and exploit the more grotesque displays of obesity.

“Drop Dead Diva” owes a lot to “Legally Blonde.” Deb, like Elle, even has a signature strut, which she calls the “booty bounce” (“shoulders back, show the rack”) and demonstrates to buck up discouraged female friends. But Ms. Elliott has a harder task than Reese Witherspoon: She has to merge two antithetical personalities without blurring the distinctions. Jane was a smarter, better person than Deb, but she was also insecure and depressed. Deb, once she settles into her legal briefs and sensible shoes, brings a dash of flirty confidence and “Born Yesterday” ingenuity to her caseload.

In the most implausible of comic mixups Ms. Elliott is convincing, and even affecting, at every turn.

Lifetime is bold to cast an actress who is hefty, without the aid of a fat suit like Gwyneth Paltrow in “Shallow Hal,” and plays a woman who is not likely to slim down magically just in time to find Mr. Right. That may be one reason so many better-known television stars signed on for small parts or walk-on appearances, from Margaret Cho, who plays Jane’s assistant, to guest stars like Rosie O’Donnell, Tim Gunn and Elliot Gould.

“Drop Dead Diva” isn’t a public-service message, it’s a lighthearted romantic comedy on Lifetime. Yet for all the farce it is grounded in reality.