There’s no business like Cho business

While it seems that every American celebrity has their own reality show nowadays, with each one promising viewers an inside peek into their lives, comedian Margaret Cho has no qualms about admitting that her recent foray into the genre, The Cho Show, is not exactly grounded in reality.
It was about 90 percent scripted. It’s not like the camera crews were following us to capture anything, we were working from scripts. It was fake reality. To me, it’s more like a sitcom starring real people, she told Sydney Star Observer.
Fake reality it may be, but audiences still get to watch Cho up close and personal. One particularly memorable episode saw Cho and her gay posse sample various Hollywood beauty techniques, including anal bleaching. She admits her butt didn’t stay blonde for long.
You have to do it every day; you have to put a little bleach on your asshole every day. You can’t keep up with that! I can barely manage my eye cream, she said.
And how about another episode, in which Cho claimed to have a haunted vagina? Another case of -˜fake reality’, or was she really being visited by ghostly beings with a penchant for pussy?
Now that was true. Some years ago, I got accosted by a fortune teller who told me my vagina was haunted. But I had an exorcism and it worked well, she said breezily, as though vaginal exorcisms were akin to bikini waxes.
Cho and her vagina aren’t the only stars of the show -” she’s surrounded by a small army of gay stylists, a petite, scene-stealing personal assistant, Selene Gomez, and her elderly Korean parents.
It was a wonderful thing to feel I had the freedom to do what I wanted this time around. I want to feel like the queer community is helped by the message of positivity and hope I spread in this show. There’s so much homophobia in the world and we need to fight it. Through humour, we can really overcome a lot.
The Cho Show may return for a second season, but not before Cho returns to her first love, stand-up comedy. In fact, she’s planning an Australian tour for September. It’s not the first time Cho has visited our shores -” she was chief of parade at the 2008 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
A couple of days before the Mardi Gras, there was a big drug bust in Sydney. I thought, oh, that’s a hate crime. They’re gonna make all those poor gay men stay up all night without no drugs? Hate crime! she cackled.
Cho said she’s looking forward to hitting the gay bars when she’s back in the country, which begs the question: with such a rabid homo following, can Margaret Cho even walk into a gay bar without being mobbed?
Absolutely, I don’t have any problem with that. I hang out in leather bars, and I prefer to hang out with bears and leather daddies. If you’re in that kind of bar, they’re way more interested in getting dick, so nobody bothers me. Besides, half of them are wearing blindfolds and gimp masks, so they couldn’t notice me even if they wanted to.

info: The Cho Show (FQ Films) is out now on DVD.