Cho and Tell

Kirk Baird

Friday, March 24, 2000 | 9:21 a.m.

It's difficult to know what to expect when interviewing comedian Margaret Cho.

Will she take on the brassy, take-no-prisoners persona of her stand-up act? Or will she be the sweeter and more demure character she played on her short-lived ABC sitcom "All-American Girl"?

The reality, like Cho herself, is somewhere in between.

Alternating effortlessly from thought-provoking and pensive to sardonic and sassy, the 31-year-old comedian seems completely at peace with herself and her current position as an "it" girl, courtesy of her one-woman, off-Broadway show, "I'm the One That I Want."

Still, there's something odd about her current elite status. After all, her fame is the direct result of a show that chronicles her fall from grace. It's an irony so twisted that it seems to be something straight from the mercurial minds of Hollywood scribes.

Nevertheless, her show has been warmly embraced by the public -- her performances routinely sell out -- and critics (among her many critical lauds, Entertainment Weekly magazine selected her show as the best performances of the year).

Cho will perform "I'm the One That I Want" at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Joint at the Hard Rock hotel-casino.

Perhaps it's no surprise to find Cho in a cheery mood recently as she relaxed at home in Los Angeles with her dogs between shows.

"I think I have a really shiny outlook, which was hard to get to," Cho said in a phone interview. "But it's really changed everything. Once you look at life in a positive way, then you reflect back to you lots of positivity. It's just the way things are; it's a natural law."

Her life now is great, she added. "There's been nothing sucky at all."

It wasn't always that way. In the mid-'90s her life was in a tailspin, beginning with her brutally disastrous 1994 foray into the world of television. It was a painful ordeal that almost single-handedly wiped out her career -- taking her along with it -- and eventually provided the nucleus of her "I'm the One" show.

RIP: 'All-American Girl'

Cho was born Dec. 5, 1968, in San Francisco to Korean parents. Her father owned a bookstore and frequently hired gays and lesbians. Consequently, Cho grew up surrounded by an eclectic mix of humanity both in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. So when she turned to stand-up comedy as her career, her jokes tended to focus on and celebrate the cultural differences she saw and reflected.

Her style of comedy, however, proved successful, as Cho found herself doing the college-circuit comedy routine, winning awards and gaining notoriety in the process. It seemed an inevitability that she would be "discovered" by the networks. After all, her East-meets-West, young-vs.-old stand-up material seemed like perfect fodder for a sitcom, which thrives on such simplistic and one-note concepts.

And to diversity-starved networks, the fact that she was Asian was almost the clinching point. So when ABC came courting Cho, it could only be a match made in ratings heaven.

The resulting union was "All-American Girl," a much-ballyhooed show with Cho cast as the titular character, a young, thoroughly westernized Korean-American woman facing weekly cultural clashes with her mom, who was still very traditional.

Although the show was supposed to be somewhat autobiographical, incredulously some ABC brass felt that Cho wasn't enough like what she should be. Right before filming began, Cho was told by studio executives that she looked a little heavy and was asked to lose weight. It was the first of many signs that things weren't going as the comedian had planned.

Feeling insecure about her position at the network, being both a newcomer and the first and only Asian with her own TV show, Cho caved in to their request, went on a dangerous crash diet and dropped 30 pounds in two weeks. Shortly thereafter, she landed in the hospital with kidney failure. Her kidneys were permanently damaged as a result.

"That was probably one of the worst things that's ever happened to me in my life, and it just got worse and worse from there," Cho said. "Because I was in the hospital, I didn't have time to pay attention to whether the scripts were funny or not. I didn't care. I just wanted to look a certain way to make sure I was pleasing the network."

When "Girl" premiered, critics savaged it as suffering from the worst kind of sitcom malady: It wasn't funny. Asian groups were also quick to criticize the show, but for different reasons. A lot of hopes had been pinned on Cho -- for better or worse -- because of the lack of Asian representation on television. The groups felt that she wasn't accurately reflecting her community. In effect, the Korean wasn't being Korean enough.

This created such a backlash at the network that ABC felt compelled to bring in a consultant to make the show more "Korean."

After six months ABC mercifully pulled the plug on "Girl." It left the then-26-year-old star without a job and without any prospects.

"I had a lot of friends I'd made over the year in the network and in higher positions in the press and couldn't talk to anybody, couldn't get anybody to speak to me, couldn't get anything done," she said.

Jeff Foxworthy, Kevin Pollak, George Carlin, Paul Rodriguez, Andrew Dice Clay ... the TV battlefield is strewn with the carcasses of comedians with failed sitcoms. But perhaps none represent the futility of the endeavor so much as Cho.

Ultimately, it was an experience that left her bitter and somewhat confused. Add to the mix a destructive relationship that Cho was in, and it's easy to see where the story takes a decidedly bleaker turn straight out of a VH1 "Behind the Music" episode. As her career continued to slip from her grasp, the comedian became increasingly reliant on drugs and alcohol as coping mechanisms. This, ultimately, led Cho to a "dark place" where she would reside for several years.

"And then suddenly I just woke up to the idea I didn't want to do it anymore, and it was really pretty easy to stop everything," she said. "I realized I could and I did."

From the ashes

Despite the intrinsic bleakness of her story, Cho said that it's not unusual to hear similar ordeals from other comedians. "Comedy is a high-risk profession," she said, "... and you kind of have to be a little crazy to be in it."

So it's not shocking when Cho said that she isn't surprised that so few comedians actually live long lives, and more often than not succumb to drug overdoses and suicide while they're very young.

"It takes a lot to be able to survive it, and to keep going and to prosper and to stay funny. That's hard, too. I think I'm really lucky."

Other than her stage performance, however, Cho has little time to focus on the sins of her past.

She's working on another act, as well as a book based on her "I'm the One" show that's due to be released sometime next year. Then there's her upcoming movie: "I'm the One" was recently filmed for two nights in San Francisco and will be distributed in wide-release this summer.

When asked if the glaring lights and the cameras recording her every move created extra pressure for her, Cho said simply that, no, she was more concerned with another aspect of that night's performance: her parents.

"They really love what I do, but they've never come come see me perform because they were really terrified by it," she said. "It was really tremendous for them to come to the show and witness the power of that -- 1,500 people just really in love with what I was doing, really appreciating it on a physical level.

"My parents were so moved by it. It was really tremendous for them to be a part of it."

As for the persistent rumors of her bisexuality, in a recent interview in Girlfriends magazine, she danced around the question, saying "They'll (her lesbian fans) like me more if they have to wait." Cho laughed after being reminded of her answer, and said she's less sure of her sexuality than ever.

"I used to think I knew what I was, now I don't really know. I'm not focusing on that part of my life at all. Everybody's cute."

One thing certain in her mind, though, is that she would like to give television another shot. Much like a defeated prizefighter clamoring for a rematch, Cho says that she has something to prove -- only this time it will be done on her terms, with her having complete control over the production. In addition, rather than returning to the sitcom format, which she understandably is not fond of, Cho would enjoy a variety or talk show -- "something that I would do as a performer."

It's Cho's hope that by keeping such a high profile, others with similar backgrounds will see her as a positive role model; someone they can point to who followed her dreams without being intimated by a lack of representation.

"My whole reason for existing is to (say), 'Yeah, you can do it. I want to inspire that in others ... to follow their dreams.' "

Even, if in Cho's case, it takes them to hell and back.

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