Margaret Cho Has Always Been Unapologetically Ahead Of Her Time

I remember feeling shocked at seeing Margaret Cho on television for the first time. A young Korean American woman wearing a cropped denim jacket and miniskirt came down the stairs and spoke into a Zack Morris-sized cell phone with a Valley Girl accent: “we’re probably going to see Psycho Sluts from Hell at the ‘plex.” A 23-year-old Margaret Cho appeared for the first time in a new sitcom called All-American Girl, which premiered on ABC in 1994. Based loosely on Cho’s real life and set in her hometown of San Francisco, All-American Girl was the very first primetime sitcom to feature a cast of Asian American actors that also included Amy Hill, Clyde Kusatsu, Jodi Long, and B.D. Wong.

I found Cho’s character “Margaret” confounding. She openly disobeyed her immigrant parents, and the only consequence was laughter from a studio audience. My mother cut me out of her life for months for simply disagreeing with something she said. Ironically, All-American Girl sanitized who Margaret Cho was in real life—a foul-talking, pot-smoking college dropout who worked as a phone sex operator in her teens. While it was unjust to expect the only Asian American woman on TV to represent my life, I nonetheless dismissed the show as unrelatable. And so did a lot of other Asian Americans. Some of the show’s harshest critics were Asian Americans who thought it was “larded with stereotypes” and “butchered Korean” while a minority appreciated it as a “defining moment for Korean and Asian Americans.” As the first Asian American family sitcom, All American-Girl shouldered an enormous representational burden.

Twenty-eight years later, Margaret Cho reflects on why Korean Americans did not accept her at the time. She tells Decider over Zoom, “Historically…the LA uprising had just happened…. The last time Koreans had seen themselves on television was on their rooftops with shotguns. So, they were so incredibly paranoid about the way they were being perceived by the white establishment.” And as a “raunchy” queer woman who was “not college-educated,” Cho says she was “not the image they wanted to project.”

After just one season, All-American Girl was canceled. In her standup film I’m the One that I Want (2000), Cho revealed that ABC hired an “Asian consultant” in reaction to the criticism because the network believed cast members “weren’t Asian enough” but they never gave Cho any artistic control. She also recalled how the network pressured her to lose weight, eventually landing her in the hospital with a diet pill addiction. After the show’s cancellation, Cho struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction and depression.

As for Asian American representation, audiences would not see another Asian American family on primetime network television until 2014 with Fresh Off the Boat. Network television essentially canceled Asian American families for 20 years based on the failure of a single Asian American sitcom. Can you imagine if one white sitcom flop meant no more TV shows featuring white casts for two decades? White folks would straight up storm ABC studios in Burbank, California.

From critiquing her mistreatment on All-American Girl, to the rise in anti-Asian racism, Margaret Cho has never shied away from joking about racism. In her most recent standup routine for the Netflix is a Joke festival on May 6, Cho addressed the fact that racists are blaming Asian Americans for COVID. Impersonating her mother with a heavy Korean accent, she joked, “it’s true Asians eat everything” but “we didn’t mean to cause COVID.” She then facetiously threatened on stage, “if you are racist, you will catch COVID, and when you go to the hospital, you will get an Asian doctor.”

While the audience laughed nervously at Cho’s COVID jokes, the reality is that more people in the United States believe that people of Asian descent are partially responsible for COVID than at the height of the pandemic. There has also been a 339 percent increase in anti-Asian violence between 2020 and 2021. Cho herself was a recent victim of anti-Asian hate. While walking her dog in Florida with her mask on, she suddenly had “30 giant eighteen-wheeler trucks” with “Trump flags” and “anti-masker flags” honking at her and shouting, “China virus.” One truck almost ran them over, missing them by “a hair.” When she tried to take a photo of the license plate, she saw they had removed it. “It was so scary” Cho says. “I was holding a salad and my dog; like what am I gonna do, throw this kale at this racism?”

To cope with the very real threats of anti-Asian racism Cho says she turns to humor. “When you laugh, the physical reaction of laughter is a breath—like if you breathe, you’re going to live for another minute.” Cho sees humor as “a kind of unexpected reinforcement of a life affirming energy that you can survive.”

And survive she has.

Since All-American Girl, Cho has done 10-plus comedy tours and has appeared in a number of TV shows (e.g., Drop Dead Diva, Good Trouble, The Flight Attendant, Hacks). She also stars in the film Fire Island (now available to stream on Hulu) as the “mother” to a group of young gay men. In one scene, she says to Joel Kim Booster’s character: “I know you all think I’m some old, ridiculous burnout, but I had a whole life before I met you, and it used to look a lot like yours. I had lovers, and friends, summers in Cherry Grove with lesbians my own age. And I thought I had it all figured out.” Like her character, Cho sees the future generation of Asian American comedians as her legacy. To Cho, All-American Girl is not a failure because the show serves as an inspiration to comedians like Joel Kim Booster, Bowen Yang, Ken Jeong, and Ali Wong. “And that’s way more than enough,” she says. For now, Margaret resumes her stand-up comedy tour on June 16 for the remainder of the year.  She will also star in a Disney + movie Prom Pact coming out in 2023.

Unapologetically ahead of her time, Margaret Cho has always been more than enough.

Nancy Wang Yuen is a sociologist and film critic of the people. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.