Oh, yes, she’s going there

Margaret Cho has a big, filthy mouth and she’s not afraid to use it. If this doesn’t strike you as courageous, then you haven’t heard the joke she tells about Laura and Barbara Bush in her new stand-up comedy film, “Assassin.” The joke is crude and outrageously impious, and it makes the audience scream with laughter. When the choking dies down, the 36-year-old comedian smiles sweetly and shrugs, “I’m probably going to get shot. So enjoy it while you can.”

The joke -- which I can’t even begin to euphemize here -- is hardly anomalous to Cho’s work. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she was born and raised in San Francisco, where she was involved in the gay rights movement from the time she was a teenager. She’s also struggled with her weight -- and its attendant body issues -- her whole life, and her material is full of appalling and hilarious stories about what dieting can do to a girl. (Including kidney failure and accidents in the car.)

Cho has always freely mixed her sex-and-potty jokes with her most heartfelt and sincere expressions of political outrage, often leading from one to the other in surprisingly few and logical steps. There is a method to her coarseness: Growing up, Cho interpreted the scarcity of images of people like her in the mainstream as a message that she was considered inappropriate. So now she’s returning the favor by acting the part. When asked, as she is at social gatherings, “not to go there,” she deadpanned in her last show, “I live there. I bought a house there. I’m going to take you there!”

The threat is visceral and real. Unlike Jon Stewart, whose race and gender allow him to impersonate what we accept as a generic “voice of authority,” making his incredulous reactions to the latest dispatches from Planet Bush funnier for their dissonance, Cho doesn’t enjoy the privileges of membership or the luxury of detachment. She’s a howling id with a vested interest in taboo-breaking -- considering how many taboos are in place to protect us from the likes of her.

Cho’s fourth concert film, “Assassin,” which was filmed at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., opened in 10 cities Friday, including Los Angeles, and debuted on the new gay cable channel Here! as well. It’s followed by the release of the CD on Oct. 25, and the DVD on Nov. 8. Her second book, “I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight,” reaches stores Oct. 20, and her first feature film, which she wrote and stars in, premieres at the Toronto Film Festival later this month. The feature film is called “Bam Bam and Celeste,” and it’s a love story about a woman and her gay best friend (Cho uses a grabbier tagline that rhymes, but I can’t repeat it here) who travel from the Midwest to New York to appear on a reality makeover show.

Hollywood didn’t immediately pounce on “Bam Bam and Celeste” -- which, after all, is no heartwarming story about a pimp with a heart of gold whose American dream comes true. In this cultural climate, it would be disingenuous to say that “Assassin” is Cho’s most overtly political show to date. It’s the most news-based, perhaps, but her work has always been political. Or rather, she has always been willing to lay herself bare to demonstrate just how political the personal is.

From her soul-crushing early days in Hollywood, where her life was hijacked as fodder for a casually racist sitcom aimed at the networks’ insatiable, but strangely narrow-minded, imaginary friend, “the mainstream audience” (a harrowing experience she chronicled in the sad and hilarious “I’m the One That I Want”), Cho’s exploration of her identity as a woman, an Asian American and a member of the gay community has always made up a big part of her work.

But she has always come at these subjects kaleidoscopically, from all kinds of sometimesconflicting angles that shift depending on the context, the intention and the timing. Whether she’s up in arms about some fresh travesty of the Bush administration or the Christian right, baffled by how people perceive her or trying to square her membership in so many minority groups with her individual sense of self. She’s a nuance artist, putting a finger on the emotion juste every time, and then poking until you squeal.

Now that we’re supposed to be post-feminist, post-culturally sensitive, and it’s OK to say “that’s so gay” again, this kind of thing is sometimes considered post-fashionable. Or inherently unfunny. That Cho invariably kills exposes the soft bigotry in that belief.

“Racism and sexism are not as obvious as before, but they have become very subtle,” she tells me, when I jump at the chance to meet her in a sunny bungalow in Glendale. “It’s not about big things like not being able to vote. It’s about small things, which are harder to fight, because they’re not perceived. But they are still damaging. We’re not giving people equal rights or acknowledging that there’s a disparity.”

Cho has always had a thing for impersonating famous and infamous revolutionaries. On her last DVD cover, Cho posed as Ernesto “Che” Guevara. On the poster for “Assassin” she’s done up like Patty Hearst as Tania, complete with beret, black pantsuit and a microphone held AK-47 style. But what’s shocking about Cho is not that what she says is revolutionary. It’s that what she says can still be perceived as revolutionary or dangerous or even offensive that’s shocking.

Even among her admirers, there are people who marvel at the fact that, as a woman, she talks about the things she does, the way she does. This is just the sort of nonmalicious, subtly dehumanizing pigeonholing Cho gets all the time; whether people are asking her what’s up with Kim Jong Il or calling her up to offer her a “great part” in a movie playing an angry liquor store owner.

“As women and minorities, our specificity is taken away from us in so many ways,” she says. “In white male culture ... they don’t really go into their ethnic identity or their gender identity. It’s all about what they do, who they are as people. Whereas with minorities, its always about the minority experience.”

How else could a series of soap ads featuring amateur models be deemed so “revolutionary” that it would launch a thousand think pieces? (Still, Cho likes the Dove ads. “It shows me how brainwashed I am that I could be shocked, alarmed and excited by them.”)

“There’s so much playing to the lowest common denominator. Politics are a good example of that,” she says. “People react to catchphrases and lazy thinking, like, ‘We’re going to kick this other country’s ass.’ When you think that way, you’re not humanizing the battle, the struggle, the war. With gay marriage, people automatically go to that place of homophobia, instead of actually thinking about gays and lesbians as people. They only see their own prejudice. Oversimplification denies people so much.”

In “Assassin,” Cho does take more of her cues from current events than she has in past shows, weighing in on Mary Cheney’s banishment from the stage during the inauguration; the intrusion of the media and government into the Schiavo family’s dispute; the morbid media deathwatch attending John Paul II’s demise; the posthumous Ronald Reagan tour (which she compares to “Weekend at Bernie’s”); and the idiotic media circus surrounding “the runaway bride,” whom Cho would hold up as a bulletproof argument against straight marriage.

But it’s interesting to note how much Cho’s original concerns -- gay rights, women’s reproductive rights and institutionalized racism (now in new, subtle, information age flavor!) -- dovetail with the battleground issues of the day. At the same time that a move is afoot to dismantle Roe vs. Wade; right-wing pundits labor to paint antiwar protesters as opportunists or worse; the Federal Communications Commission’s inflammatory battle against “obscenity” emboldens extremists who would de-fund public television to pretend a cartoon about a bespectacled character’s trip to a lesbian couple’s farm is the kiddie equivalent of an Augusten Burroughs memoir; and so much of our news is presented in an endless loop of “facts” devoid of any political or historical context, Cho’s work seems more relevant than ever.

The genius of Cho’s smuttiness is in how completely it rejects our skittish, lazy, mealy-mouthed reluctance to say what is true, real and right in front of our faces, not to mention with clarity and force, for fear that someone, somewhere will be offended. Like Lenny Bruce, Cho uses profanity and scatology to cut through the haze of euphemism and spin that constantly threatens to obscure reality and deny humanity. In her last show, Cho said she had taken a personal cue from the well-known ACT UP motto from the ‘80s, “Silence=Death.” For her, she said, “Silence=Invisibility.” By poking fun at everybody equally, she puts everyone on equal footing. She makes everyone visible. She humanizes everybody. Even the Bush ladies, whether they like it or not.