Cho and Her Mother of Comic Invention

As every Margaret Cho fan knows, stories about her mother are among the highlights of her freewheeling, iconoclastic comedy routines. “Notorious C.H.O.,” which opens Friday, is a filmed version of the show she took on the road last year. It begins with backstage interviews with her parents and ends with a tale about her mother falling off a camel she didn’t want to ride in the first place.

“Sometimes I say [to Margaret],” said Cho’s mother, Young Hie Cho, on a recent visit to Los Angeles, “I have to talk to you very often, otherwise you’ll be out of material!”

These days they’ve been rendezvousing in person--last month in New York, where Cho received the Lambda Liberty Award for her book “I’m the One That I Want”; earlier this month in San Francisco for the world premiere of “Notorious C.H.O.”; and now here in Cho’s new home, in the sunny Glendale hills, which is still being decorated.

The Korean American mother and daughter are sitting cozily next to each other at the end of a long couch, two peas in a pod, except one is in yellow and the other in white. Mrs. Cho has donned a bright yellow top made of crinkled fabric with sensible flats, while Margaret wears a loose-fitting white dress with little suede booties. The comedian seems remarkably relaxed and even teddy-bearish, a contrast to the tough, abrasive C.H.O. persona she assumes onstage.

Her pad is a funky version of a modest Hollywood mansion--or a kind of postmodern Tony Duquette fantasy, what with two knee-high gilded lions flanking the outside walk and rooms painted in vivid, mottled colors and filled with ornate Indian and Southeast Asian-style furnishings and objets, looking mostly too new to be antiques. “Actually I got most of this stuff around L.A.,” says Cho.

The living room, where the interview takes place, is graced with a dancing Shiva figurine in one corner and, on the wall, two panels depicting Kama Sutra-style copulating couples. For a moment Mrs. Cho drops her perennial smile and casts a furtive look over to the wall. She remarks, “Mmm, difficult to have children here.”

What is it like being the subject of Cho’s routines? Mrs. Cho claims she is used to it and swells with pride when recounting how strangers gush when they discover she’s the comedian’s mother. At the San Francisco premiere of “Notorious C.H.O.,” the audience went wild when Cho’s parents were introduced.

“I really enjoyed being there,” says Mrs. Cho. “So many came for her premiere, I feel they really love Margaret--and they really like me too!”

Cho’s stage show ends in an anthem of inclusiveness and self-acceptance, but while growing up, even in multiracial San Francisco, she couldn’t help but feel cheated that she wasn’t mainstream--that is, middle-class white. “We wanted to be really American,” says Cho, 33. “At the same time, we’re constantly reminded of our foreignness every time we go home--the customs, the different food, the different life we had as opposed to the one we saw on TV or at our friends’ house.”

Did she ever wish she were white?

“Oh, all the time,” Cho cheerily admits. “It was a constant longing, and it didn’t even go away till like my late teens, where I finally let it go because I realized it wasn’t gonna happen.” She laughs.

Then her consciousness was raised. In her teens, her feeling of racial inferiority “turned completely around and became this fierce pride, into like being angry about it.”

Early on she learned to use it in her comedy. Cho had started doing stand-up comedy while a student at the High School of the Performing Arts, and by 16 she was lining up her own gigs. Soon she dropped out of high school and went on the road to perform. Observations on Asian identity and on her mother (originally disguised under the name Edna) were already woven into her material.

“When she was small I never thought she’s gonna be actress or comedian,” her mother admits. “When she became teenager, we want her to be like some kind of doctor, any kind of job she can study in college. She was really smart, we expected her to go to Harvard or Stanford or something like that, but she turned out different way. I’m a very flexible person, so after a while we cannot say anything, we’re really happy.”

Was the atmosphere at home always so approving? Cho shakes her head. After all, they were strict Asian parents, she points out. “They didn’t like it.”

There was a brief but ultimately ignominious moment when Cho did feel accepted by Greater America--in 1994, when she landed the lead in “All-American Girl,” a groundbreaking ABC sitcom based on her own life and family.

Except, as detailed in her show, film and book, “I’m the One That I Want,” pretty soon the execs found her face “too full,” so they put her on a killer diet (after two weeks she was hospitalized for kidney failure); they didn’t find her Asian enough, so they hired an Asian consultant; and they found her humor too acerbic, so asked her to tone it down. Finally, the show was canceled--which she has referred to as being “saved by the gong,” although she slid into a booze-fueled depression.

Cho’s routines are famously outrageous and raunchy, full of references to sex, race and politics. She takes her digs at clueless boyfriends and ditzy chicks; she eulogizes gay men and drag queens whom she sees as her allies. In the current show she recounts hilariously humiliating moments, including a visit to a sex club replete with dominatrixes and voyeurs and a session of colonic irrigation with a tittering clinician who somehow sticks the tube into the wrong orifice.

How much of her material is taken from real life and how much is made up? Although she changes names and makes up composite characters, she says, “it’s all really based on truth.”

When she does her Mommy persona, Cho squints her eyes, drops a corner of her mouth, presses back her neck and speaks in a sputtering Korean accent.

In real life her mother is neither squinty nor sputtering, although if given half a chance the real Mrs. Cho clearly loves to spin anecdotes.

In “Notorious” there is a routine in which Mommy begins, “I think everybody’s a little bit ga-a-ay ... “ and tells a story about Daddy’s best friend in college, a man, it turns out, who was in love with him.

Toward the end of the interview, Cho’s father, Seung Hoon Cho, comes by, and he acknowledges that he had a very close friend in college. However, when asked if he ended up punching the guy as in Cho’s tale, he begins to laugh uncomfortably.

Looking embarrassed, he says, “It’s all in the imagination.” Sitting on the other end of the sofa, Cho’s eyes bulge skeptically as she mouths the words, “It’s true, it’s true....”

Though “Notorious” doesn’t delve into the dilemma of Asian American identity as much as “I’m the One That I Want,” Cho still believes it’s an important issue, and it’s one she plans to address centrally in her next show.

“What gets me about racism nowadays is that it’s very subtle,” she says. “In film, it’s great there are all these stars coming from Asia--Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan--but it almost reinforces the idea of Asian foreignness. Asian Americans seem lackluster compared to these foreigners who can run up walls and do amazing feats. So for Asian Americans to qualify for the film screen, we’re expected to have special powers, which is unfair.”

Meanwhile, her mother remains a strong part of her routine and will for the foreseeable future. “To me it’s the voice of my Asianness, the part of me that remains foreign,” Cho admits. “There’s a real earthiness to it.

“It’s not really making fun of it at all. It’s more an ancient perspective in a modern world, that’s how I see it--the juxtaposition between the immigrant mind and the very modern circumstances in which I see myself.”