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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER   OCTOBER 2000 VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1

I’m the One That I Want:
The All-American Girl Meets the Assmaster Fan Club
By Hank Williams

I realized two things while on the road this summer: one is why I don’t watch too many blockbuster movies and the second is why I like New York. It wasn’t too surprising that X-Men and Nutty Professor 2 were as bad as they were, but it was unfortunate that that’s all there was in Altoona, PA. Sure, they had all the other big summer movies there, but that’s it.

You see, Altoona, much like the strip-malls-on-steroids suburbia that’s infecting the nation faster than the West Nile Virus scare, is homogeneity at its worst. That’s what happens when “diversity” simply means a Mexican or Japanese chain restaurant in the food court. This is the vision of prosperity that George Dubya, Al (Mr. Excitement) Gore, and their lackeys have for America, but that’s a rant for a separate column. The point is that it sucks. One antidote for that is Margaret Cho, who has to be Bush and Gore’s worst nightmare: a loud, funny, Korean-American lesbian. I’m the One that I Want is a documentary of one of her live performances last year.

Cho succeeds because she’s funny and puts herself out there, laying bare her incredible pain. Cho had seemingly achieved the American dream, securing a network TV sitcom deal based on her stand up routine, making good money, and living in Hollywood, which was exactly the point that her life began to unravel.

The paradox is that human pain, as long as the audience can remain detached, is one of the traditional staples of comedy. The Three Stooges slapping the bejeezus out of each other and all sorts of pratfalls involving human misfortune are all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Cho’s shtick recalls the ferocity and immediacy reminiscent of early Richard Pryor and Freddie Prinze as she publicly tries to come to grips with life in a Hollywood and a country that is still not comfortable with its multicultural or sexual reality.

Cho recalls the absurdity of receiving a telephone call explaining to her ABC TV’s concern that her face was too fat (meaning too Korean-looking). Cho’s response was a crash diet and exercise program that shed 30 pounds from her frame and permanently damaged her kidneys. She paid a heavy price for racist network execs who decided that maybe it was a little too bold to actually have real Asian-Americans up there on the small screen.

Cho also recounts the network’s decision that the show wasn’t “Asian” enough (despite having a cast that was mostly Asian-American) and the hilarious result of their decision to hire an Asian consultant, who reminded her to use chopsticks and remove her shoes when entering the house.

The cancellation of Cho’s TV series left her an emotional wreck and with the incendiary combination of having too much money coupled with too much time on her hands. Her catharsis came after an all night alcohol and drug binge with an equally intoxicated and high boyfriend and the decision that she didn’t want to end up dead.

One indication that Cho is more at peace with herself comes in her reaction to her first lesbian sexual experience. “Once I had sex with a woman and I went through this whole thing, like, ‘Am I gay? Am I straight?’ And I realized, I’m just slutty. Where’s my parade? What about slut pride?”

Much of Cho’s routine is about her mother and her experience growing up with traditional (but liberal) Korean parents in San Francisco’s Haight district (the hippie and gay Mecca), where they owned a bookstore. Cho’s mom managed the porn section of the store. One of the more memorable sketches is Cho’s imitation of mom’s reaction to the gay sex book Assmaster, where her mom decides that “too much ass is not a good thing,” declaring that “ass in moderation” is much healthier.

Cho could mug for the camera a little less and she has a tendency to stretch her jokes out, which works sometimes, but her routine would flow better if she just kept things moving. These are small criticisms as Cho’s material is fresh and funny and she does a good job carrying the show by herself.

Cho’s plans for the future? “I just want to do [comedy] for a long time ... at least until the next Korean-American fag-hag, s**t-starter, girl comic, trash talker, comes up and takes my place.” It might take a while.

I’m the One That I Want, 88 minutes, playing at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan

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