PsyCHO

Margaret Cho is angry, but she wants you to know she is using that anger to heal. Filmed after a particularly brutal stretch of news and the consecutive losses of her comedy mentors, Joan Rivers and Robin Williams, the set is an exercise in processing grief and rage through graphic punchlines. The standout sequence comes when she charts the twenty-year gap between her own short-lived 1994 sitcom, All-American Girl, and the premiere of Fresh Off the Boat, dryly noting that her show was such a high-profile disaster it took networks two decades to trust an Asian-American family on television again.

Recorded at the Gramercy Theatre in New York City, the 2015 Showtime special finds Cho leaning hard into the “psycho” label often thrown at women who speak their minds. Rather than dodging the tag, she claims it, using the hour to address her own history with abuse alongside international tragedies and the silence around bisexual representation. While some of the material, like her impressions of her mother or jokes about Kim Kardashian, walks well-trodden ground, the show is at its strongest when she pays heartfelt, messy tribute to Rivers and Williams, even explaining how Williams inspired her street-level homeless outreach work in San Francisco.