No business like Cho business

By Nick Bond

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 Nick Bond.

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.

Cho has made a career out of impersonating her parents, so how did they feel about appearing on-screen themselves? “They love it so much, they're such hams. They really love to be in front of the camera,” she said.

She didn't need to convince them- “Well, they said no, but I just kept scheduling them. I never listened to them, I just kept giving them their call times, and they'd just show up. They've never actually officially said yes to being in the show. I tricked them into it.”

Of course, The Cho Show isn't the comic's first small-screen excursion. In 1994, Cho starred in All American Girl, a short-lived Asian-American sitcom infamous for its off-screen ructions. Producers told her she wasn't Asian enough; they later decided she was too Asian. She was asked to lose weight before the show started filming, as producers were also concerned about the roundness of her face. She lost almost 14 kilograms in two weeks, ending up in hospital with kidney failure.

With this chequered past, Cho said it felt good to return to television on her own terms. “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. “It was incredible. I was hanging out with Cyndi Lauper, who was also at Mardi Gras. I wanted to go to Cyndi's show, but it was at seven in the morning, and I couldn't manage it. I couldn't believe the stamina of these guys -- the Mardi Gras party starts at 10pm and goes until like 10am the next morning. “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.”

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