She’s Cho Fine

In her critically acclaimed concert film “I’m the One That I Want,” the engagingly raunchy Margaret Cho touches on everything from her promiscuity to her affection for gay men (“Some people are raised by wolves; I was raised by drag queens”).

But it’s the Korean American comedian’s experience with her short-lived ABC sitcom, “All-American Girl”--the first TV comedy about an Asian American family--that provides the tragicomic core of her one-woman show, which was filmed at the Warfield Theater in her hometown of San Francisco in November.

Told by network executives that she needed to lose weight, she lost 30 pounds in two weeks and wound up suffering kidney failure. As she tells it, when she didn’t test-market as being Asian enough, the network brought in an Asian consultant, whose advice included telling Cho to use chopsticks, “and when you’re through eating, put them in your hair.” And the network curbed her comic sensibility to the point where, Cho says, the series should have been called “Saved by the Gong.”

After broadcast of the episode in which her character promises not to embarrass her parents in her stand-up act again--something Cho does frequently in her real-life act--her then-boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino, called to admonish her, saying she had let the network “take your voice away.”

But as “I’m the One That I Want” makes abundantly clear, there is one place Cho has never been in danger of losing her voice: on the stand-up stage.

That’s why she made her concert film, said Cho, who begins a three-night run at the Irvine Improv tonight.

“I wanted it to be about my experiences in television and being thrust into that world and to talk about my experiences as honestly as I could in the language that I speak, which is stand-up comedy,” Cho, 31, said from her home in the Hollywood Hills, where she went into a tailspin of booze and drugs in 1995 after her TV series was canceled at the end of one season.

Cho said she’s happy with the film version of her one-woman show, which had an off-Broadway run last year, followed by a 40-city tour that ended in June.

“I loved the show and I felt like it really captured what I do best as an artist,” said Cho, who was influenced by earlier concert films made by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. In fact, she was about 10 when she saw her first Pryor concert film in San Francisco, where her parents ran a bookstore in the city’s gay district.

“It really changed my life,” she recalled. “Performance has always appealed to me, but I wasn’t sure what I’d do. Seeing Richard Pryor really made me feel like that’s it.”

Cho, who has always tapped personal experiences for her stand-up act, describes her comedic voice as that of an outsider.

“I’ve felt like an outsider everywhere, no matter what,” she said. “From my family, from my high school and even younger, I’ve always felt out of place. Because of that I always managed to get by, by being a very keen observer.”

With stand-up, which she began doing at 16 before dropping out of high school, “I feel like an outsider who has found a way to have power.”

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Except for promoting her concert film, Cho has put her “I’m the One That I Want” show behind her and is developing a new act.

“It’s a lot about relationships, about addiction, about eating disorders, a lot about the issues of self-love and self-esteem, race, sexuality, gender, and gay and lesbian issues--a lot of the same themes I explored in the show before,” Cho said. She’ll launch a major tour next summer, which will coincide with the publication of her autobiography for Ballantine.

Cho, a gifted mimic of body language and facial expressions, said she is also developing material dealing with her Korean-born mother, whom Cho deftly skewers with a combination of affection and ridicule.

“It’s hard to write [about her] because it’s very hard to translate it onto paper,” Cho said. “That’s what I discovered when I was doing my book. When you quote her, it doesn’t sound funny on the page or make sense, but it’s funny in the performance.”

BE THERE

Margaret Cho, Irvine Improv, 71 Fortune Drive. 8:30 p.m. Also Friday, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 7, 9 and 11 p.m. $17-20. (949) 854-5455.