Comedienne Margaret Cho

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Margaret Cho. She is at least as well-known for being outspoken in her opinion of societal standards of beauty, gender and sexuality as for her comedy, but her outspokenness would have gone unnoticed were her acts not worthy of notice in the first place. Here the comedienne and I speak about various topics; enjoy the interview!

Hi, it’s great to meet you. How are you?
Pretty good. How are you?

I’m good. So… this isn’t directly related to your show, but it occurred to me as I was reading your interview in Bust magazine, which is my favorite magazine, by the way.
Ah, yeah, I love that magazine.

Are you a reader of Bitch magazine?
Uh-huh! Yeah, I did a foreword for their anthology.

Oh, really! It definitely seems like something that would be up your alley.
Mhm!

Okay, now let’s talk about your show. You’ve put together a new show called Fingerbang. Want to tell me a little bit about that?
It’s a show wherein I’m doing some music stuff, so it’s very much about getting together with whoever are these different musicians I’m working with and putting on a show at Largo, which is a court that I really love to play, and they’ve moved so now it’s this really big place, and it’s just our playground in which to do a lot of different stuff, and it’s a lot of fun because, you know, the music thing is very excited for me. I don’t know, I just love doing it; it’s very, very cool.

Are you not as invested in incorporating music into your shows usually?
Well, I’ve been doing music in comedy stuff since… 2003? So now I’m just doing more of a push and putting more music in. And I’m also playing for myself; before I would use recorded tracks and sing to the tracks but now I’m using all of my friends who are great musicians and having them give me lessons and help me and teach me and I’m playing it by myself, so that’s a big change.

Oh, cool! Do you know a bunch of different instruments, or—?
Well, right now I’m playin’ the guitar, and also the craviola and the banjo.

What on earth is the craviola?
It’s a special kind of guitar.

I see—and my dad plays the banjo! Okay, you recently finished your Beautiful tour, didn’t you?
Yeah, I finished that tour, and I filmed it in Long Beach for the DVD and it’ll probably be out in June or something like that.

What did that tour consist of? Less music than Fingerbang?
Yeah, yeah. I was doing a lot of different stuff. That was some music, but it was mostly comedy, so that was really fun. I mean, I really enjoyed doing that; it was cool. It was like a big stand-up show, and I hadn’t done a stand-up show for a couple of years because I was doing… I did my dance show, which was The Sensuous Woman, which was a big music-comedy-dancing extravaganza, and so it was great to return to stand-up doing the Beautiful show.

Is stand-up kind of home base for you?
Yeah, yeah, it’s where I come back down to and always knew. It’s what I love.

You participate in other people’s routines as well. I just recently saw a clip from Amanda Palmer’s show in which you were with a [fake] “Katy Perry”.
Oh, yeah, that was fun. She’s a very, very good friend of mine. Yeah, I try to work with other people and just to kind of connect with other people. I think it’s a lot of fun.

What inspired—well, obviously, hearing her song on the radio all the time, but what made you decide to do that skit?
Oh, I don’t know! [laughs] It was Amanda’s idea! I didn’t really care. It was just to be funny.

Yeah, well, it was funny! And you’re in an upcoming show on VH1, aren’t you?
Well, I was. I had my own show on VH1 last year, and now I have a new show on Lifetime Television called Drop Dead Diva, which will start airing in June. So that’s like a comedy-drama kind of show. It’s very… I’m not used to doing the scripted stuff, so this is like a totally new thing for me.

What happened to the VH1 show?
I don’t know. It’s going to be hard to do while I’m doing this other show, so I’m going to have to figure out a way to do—it’s a little tough.

That one was partially reality-based, wasn’t it?
Yeah, and it was also semi-scripted. I would love to find a way to do it. We’ll probably do it in another capacity; it probably won’t be on VH1 but either we’ll do it online or it’ll be some other kind of show.

It’s almost like you’ve been easing into doing more scripted stuff.
Yeah, which is cool. It’ll be fun.

Anything you can tell me ahead of time? Story lines?
I actually don’t know any yet. We haven’t started shooting; I’m moving to Atlanta, which is where it shoots, so that’s sort of my new life, so I’ll have to figure out how that’s going to be.

Where are you based now?
Los Angeles.

How is it there?
It’s great. It’s raining really hard, which is really weird because that never happens here.

Here in New York it’s not stopped snowing and all of a sudden tomorrow it’s going to jump up to fifty.
Oh, wow!

Not that I’m complaining. A winter in New York…
Yeah, but it’s still New York.

Of course! Have you been to New York a lot?
Uh-huh. I did my last show off-Broadway for many months, so I was there this time of year and it was pretty hard to do burlesque when it was, like, twenty degrees. [laughs] It was pretty hard!

Speaking of which, I’ve read that you’ve taken up belly dancing.
Yes. I have sort of taken a break from it, but I do love it. It’s a beautiful art form. It’s hard to do with my schedule now, I can’t really dance so much as I used to, but I do love it. It’s a great thing to do for yourself because it’s such a beautiful thing to move that way, and it’s very good for your body… I really love it.

It seems like the kind of thing that would help improve one's own body image.
I think it does. I think it’s a very healthy thing for anyone, you know? For men and women to do. I think it’s a really great thing especially for women, but, yes, it’s something I did study for a very long time and I spent a lot of time traveling all over the world trying to take lessons and get people to teach me. It was a very cool thing to do.

I think that sort of activity, it’s especially great that it’s out there when, especially now, societal views of people’s bodies and especially women’s bodies are so bizarre and unrealistic.
Yeah. Yeah, so it’s wonderful to have that to sort of save you from all that shit.

Do you think the situation’s improving or getting worse?
I think it’s getting worse, actually, from the way that women’s bodies are scrutinized on the internet and the way people talk about women’s bodies nowadays in relation to how people should look or with the idea that there’s a right way to look. Especially with celebrities, like this whole big story about how Jessica Simpson’s fat when she’s not fat! She’s just a woman! And it’s a horrible thing to say that there’s something wrong with her just because she’s bigger, or whatever. She looks great! She looks better, probably, than most of the people who are talking about how fat she is. [laughs]

And it’s especially hard on teenagers, I think.
Yeah, it’s horrible. And it doesn’t make any sense, because what they’re calling “fat” is not. Anything that’s not skeletal is considered fat, or whatever. It’s ridiculous.

This concludes our interview! For more information about her current comedy show, her upcoming Lifetime TV show, or the plethora of other things we did not get around to covering, like her upcoming presence at South by Southwest, visit her website.