I'm the One That I Want

Margaret Cho uses the wreckage of her canceled sitcom to build a much better stand-up hour. After ABC pulled the plug on All-American Girl, she endured an eating disorder fueled by network weight demands, severe substance abuse, and professional exile. She returns to the stage not looking for sympathy, but to break down the casual daily racism of Hollywood. The set pieces are intensely specific, pulling material from extreme diets, a stint on a lesbian cruise ship, and an encounter with Karl Lagerfeld in jail.

Recorded in November 1999 at the Warfield Theater in her hometown of San Francisco, the audio release captures a comic entirely shedding her industry-approved persona. Cho anchors the set with heavy vocal performance, particularly in the precise impressions of her mother’s blunt, unintentionally funny phone messages. The performance earned massive critical praise and effectively restarted her career on her own terms. She closes the set by promising to hold the microphone until another “Korean-American, fag hag, shit starter, girl comic, trash talker” arrives to take her place.