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A comedian’s job, Margaret Cho says, is to advance boundaries and be offensive. That’s how you get to her adopted blazon of comedy: the astringent kind.
“I anticipate that’s the best, aback it’s aloof absolutely acrid and honest,” says Cho, who brings her latest actor show, “Fresh Off the Bloat,” to the Warner Theatre on Saturday. “There’s a lot of atrocity and severity, and that’s what I’m consistently angry to get to.”
Cho uses her audacious ball to riff on capacity like racism, sexism, abuse, homophobia and abduction ability — cartoon heavily on her own adventures as a feminist, bisexual Korean-American who speaks aboveboard about accepting been raped and abused. But “Fresh Off the Bloat” marks a bit of a rebirth. “This time, I’m talking about actuality beginning off drugs, bubbler and on the border of suicide and I’ve appear aback to life,” she says. “I’ve assuredly been fished out of the River Styx.”
In 2016, Cho entered adjust to focus on her brainy bloom afterwards her accompany staged an action (she anticipation she was activity to a affair and showed up with wine). “I admired my hospital ‘Girl, Interrupted’ moment,” she says now, absorption on the year she spent accepting better. “I aloof affectionate of alone out [of society], and I anticipate accepting abroad is fabulous. You apprentice how to acquisition a abode for self-care, whatever that looks like — so for me, it was all about aggravating to acquisition a way to alive in the absolute world.”
Cho grew up in San Francisco, area her parents ran a bookstore that specialized in gay literature. She started accomplishing actor in the ’80s and has aback appeared in movies and TV shows (including memorable turns as Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un on “30 Rock”); appear two albums of songs; accounting books and advised appearance lines.
As the aboriginal Asian-American woman to brilliant in her own arrangement ball (the mid-’90s’ “All-American Girl”), she frequently critiques issues like assortment on TV, abnormally in her stand-up.
“It’s a lot about chase and ball and television, it’s talking about whitewashing, it’s about how things accept and haven’t changed,” Cho says. “There acclimated to be actual little representations [of any minorities], and now we accept some. It’s not the best, but it’s accepting better.”
Cho hasn’t buried her antipathy for what she calls the “vile” President Trump and says she affairs to breach into “disgusting politics” throughout the tour. “He’s a above affair in my life, and a lot of bodies are absolutely scared,” she says. “How do we survive this? It’s nuts.”
Coming to D.C. — beneath than a mile from the White House, no beneath — will counterbalance on her show, she says: “It’s like advancing to the centermost of American politics, area it all starts and ends. Everybody there has a pale in backroom and is somehow ensconced in political life. There’s a lot to get into.”
Maybe it seems acrid or adverse to beam at the capacity she discusses, but Cho is determined about the healing ability of humor. It’s a arresting mechanism, she says, and badinage about affliction can advice allay it. “I anticipate sometimes it’s absolutely the alone way we can action aback and survive,” she says.
Warner Theatre, 513 13th St. NW; Sat., 8 p.m., $27.50-$57.50.
More things to do in D.C. this week:
The Freer and Sackler galleries to reopen with a two-day anniversary and new exhibits
‘Loving Vincent,’ Soviet cinema and the Middleburg Film Anniversary are all on the horizon
What you charge to apperceive about The Anthem, the massive new music area at D.C.’s The Wharf
