Actors - Margaret Cho

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Margaret Cho

	Actors - Margaret Cho

Margaret Cho (born Moran Cho on December 5, 1968 in San Francisco, California) is a Korean-American comedian and actress.

Biography

Cho won the American Comedy Award for Best Female Comedian in 1994. She made television history that year by being the first female Asian American to have a television series based around her. (The first Asian American of either gender to have his own televsion show was the late Pat Morita who starred in the 1976 Mr. T and Tina on ABC. The second Asian American to be top-billed in a TV show was Gedde Watanabe in ABC's Gung Ho in 1986, based on the film of the same name.) Cho's sitcom called All American Girl, was quickly canceled after suffering major content changes over the course of one season. Cho's desperation to make the show a success led to decisions that affected her health negatively. Her rapid weight loss in order to complete the pilot episode caused serious kidney failure. The program was also problematic because much of the humor was based on broad Asian stereotypical portrayals of her relatives.

Since then, Cho has had several successful one-woman shows. The first, called I'm the One That I Want, dealt with her difficulties breaking into show business due to her ethnicity and weight. The 2000 film version became the highest-grossing film in history in proportion to the number of prints ($1.4 million with only 9 prints). The second, 2002's Notorious C.H.O. (the title a spoof on rap artist Lil' Kim's album The Notorious K.I.M., and that in turn being a tribute to Lil' Kim's late boyfriend's nickname "The Notorious B.I.G.") dealt with her having been raised in 1970s San Francisco and her own bisexuality. Both tours spawned live movie versions, albums, and books.

Much of her comedy is quite sexually explicit; some of her favorite subjects include her fondness for gay men and proud identity as a "fag hag," sharp political commentary, descriptions of her problems with prejudice, substance abuse, and eating disorders, and her relationship with her mother, which she loves to satirize. She has comedically mentioned her plans to "cover her vagina with leaves" because of her belief that falling in to such a trap was the only way that someone would enter it. In the same vein, she has also opined that if one doesn't have sex for a long time, say two years, then one's virginity is automatically earned back. ("I have a vagina I'm not using. Would any of you like to have it?") The poster for her first one-woman show (and film), I'm the One That I Want, featured her holding her arms out as if gripping a steering wheel but with her index finger extended, an allusion to a long joke she tells involving the rides home after using digital rectal stimulation as a means to expeditiously complete oral favors for men.

In 2003, she filmed another stand-up film, Revolution, released in 2004. She also began an internet presence with the advent of http://www.margaretcho.com and her daily weblog. She began to draw intense fire from conservatives over her fiercely anti-Bush commentary; a live performance in Houston, Texas, was threatened with picketing. Although protesters never showed up, she held a counter protest outside the club until security told her she had to go inside.

One of Cho's core base of fans has always been the gay and lesbian community, and she is always a supportive and sympathetic advocate of that group. After SF Mayor Gavin Newsom initiated same-sex marriages in San Francisco in 2004, Cho started , a website promoting the legalization of gay marriage in the United States.

In 2004, Cho was performing at a corporate gig in a hotel when, after 10 minutes, her microphone was cut off and a band was instructed to begin playing. Cho claims this was because the manager of the hotel was offended by anti-Bush-administration comments. Cho's payment, which was issued by way of check directly to a non-profit organization, West Memphis 3, initially bounced but was eventually honored. In July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention, Cho was un-invited to speak at a Human Rights Campaign/National Stonewall Democrats fundraiser because of fear that her comments might cause controversy.

In late 2004, Cho began work on her first self-written and starring film role. The movie is called Bam Bam and Celeste and is a low-budget comedy about a fag hag and her gay best friend. The film co-stars Cho's friend and co-touring act Bruce Daniels. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2005.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Margaret Cho ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Margaret Cho; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay