KUALA LUMPUR, May 19 — Korean-American stand-up comedienne Margaret Cho’s Fresh off the Bloat tour, which made a pleasantly uncharacteristic stopover in Kuala Lumpur on May 11, is a comedy tour de force not for the faint of heart.
She came. She saw. She twerked.
That’s right. At age 49, Margaret Moran Cho — comedienne, woman, bisexual, feminist (an intersectional one at that) — twerked in front of a 2,000-strong high-spirited audience in the middle of the (gentrified) ghetto heartland of Kuala Lumpur (that’s Sentul to the uninitiated).
But her twerk, which started off her less-than-60-minute (by which I and many other fans that night felt cheated but more of that later) stand-up routine, was not a mindless shtick to elicit hollow laughs.
It had a meaning. A higher purpose.
She was quick to note she has no junk in her trunk because, like most Asians, she spent her youth sitting in her chair, studying.
It was the twerk of a woman who, in her own words, “is coming back to life” after an 18-month stint in rehab for alcoholism and suicide.
She could not have picked a better time to celebrate her rebirth, though completely serendipitous — two days after the formation of the new government.
She dedicated a post-show congratulatory post to her Malaysian fans on her Instagram feed.
In fact, the show was preceded by a rendition of Negaraku, sending the audience into a state of unbridled nationalistic pride.
Fresh off the Bloat, the latest offering from the San Francisco native, was arguably Cho’s most personal.
Exorcising the demons that had possessed her for most of her adult life — alcohol, drugs; hell, she even suffered sexual assault at the hands of an uncle — she confronted them the only way she knew how; with brutality and severity.
But “brutal” and “severe” are mild adjectives to describe her brand of humour.
Take the case of her sexual assault. How does one make light of what is unequivocally one of the darkest human experiences?
You don’t, especially not around Easter, according to a female audience member who walked out of her show at a New Jersey comedy club in protest.
Such is the nature of the sexy beast that is Cho — brash, crass, irreverent and unapologetic.
Her take-no-prisoner attitude is what endears her to the very people on whom she riffs off — Asians (Koreans, per her mother, are the most savage of all the Asian races), LGBT people, and other racial and sexual minorities.
She was there for all the historical milestones, for better or worse, including the AIDS epidemic at its height.
Of course, she had to go there and take a crack at the gays who are spared the virus (but in keeping with the family-friendly status of this paper, I shall refrain from republishing the joke).
As if feeling the wind of change that had swept the nation on her tattooed skin, she was also quick to make her politics known, in and out of Hollywood.
The now-mandatory jokes about Harvey Weinstein (his penchant for climatic emissions into potted plants) and others in the legion of fallen predatory men in show business were interspersed by a suspiciously embellished account of her email exchange with Oscar-winning fangirl Tilda Swinton on the subject of whitewashing in Hollywood movies (of which Swinton was notoriously accused for her role in Doctor Strange).
Out of Hollywood, she offered some makeup tips to the orange US boss (one word: concealer).
The hallmark of a brilliant comedienne — Rolling Stone magazine, in 2017, did not name her one of the best 50 stand-up comics of all-time for nothing — is their ability to make their fans lose track of time.
But being shrewdly Asian, this fan kept time. Her set barely passed the 60-minute mark and ended abruptly.
Hardcore fans will remember Cho being a guest on Sex and the City circa 2002, in which she played a fashion show producer version of herself called Lynne.
Though most will forgive her for the truncated set, those who don’t, like me, demand that she return for an encore, even if we have to, in the (paraphrased) words of Lynne, “hunt her down, skin her alive, have one of the other comedians wear her.”
