Take on someone else’s face. Or their words. And make something ‘new’—something ‘not not.’ I argue that this is Margaret Cho’s answer to her own question above. The Korean-American stand-up comedian has struggled with her own image for virtually her entire life, including a climactic moment during which her network producer said Cho’s face is too fat to fit on a TV screen, prompting the comedienne to lose 30 pounds in just two weeks. Margaret Cho tells this story, and others like it, to a large audience in her powerful stand-up comedy performance I’m the One that I want. In it, Cho responds to the producer’s abjection of Cho’s body, a surprise to her, by humorously saying, “I always thought I was pretty OK looking. I had no idea that I was this giant face taking over America!” (2000). Years after, the poster-image for Cho’s latest stand-up act Revolution (2003) is an obvious appropriation of Che Guevara’s famous graphic-portrait, which is one of the most well-known political images of the 20^th century. The 'new' image more confidently situates Cho(’s face) into a history of revolutionary politics and pop-culture. It is also ironic, of course, as Cho’s fans might say she doesn’t take herself quite so seriously. She does and she doesn’t. Like the image that is neither Cho nor Guevara, but signifies them both, Cho’s stand-up work is hybrid, layered, and particular to the performance nature of her work, it oscillates. Margaret Cho moves from serious to not, from humorous to sad, from abject to empowered, from non-normative to normative, from performing herself to not, from being politically effective to not.

 

            In his text, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, currently the only substantial text that addresses stand-up, John Limon writes, “as I wrote these essays, over time, abjection became my master theme. I mean by abjection two things. First, I mean by it what everybody means by it: abasement, groveling prostration.” He continues, “Second, I mean by it what Julia Kristeva means: a psychic worrying of those aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of, that seem, but are not quite, alienable—for example, blood, urine, feces, nails, and the corpse” (Limon, 4). The many applications that ‘abjection’ can have to stand-up comedy—stand-up as an abject genre of performance itself, and the content of it as often very crude—certainly applies to Margaret Cho’s work. In her performances, she tells us of how she loves the word ‘faggot,’ had her vagina washed after she urinated blood from losing weight too quickly, became an alcoholic and wet the bed, performed too much oral sex after 9/11, and much more. Although Limon’s text is partially useful in understanding what stand-up comedy as a performance mode is and is about, including Margaret Cho’s, it is a frustrating read. He relies too heavily on psychoanalytic theory and ignores almost everything else. His book is meant to be definitive, made explicit when he says “The one-sentence version of the theory of this book would state the claim that what is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection. Stand-up makes vertical (or ventral) what should be horizontal (or dorsal)” (Limon, 4). Although there is truth to what he says, Limon does not sufficiently address the complex agency of stand-up comedians as social actors, nor does he engage much with theories in the study of performance.

            My essay on Margaret Cho’s stand-up comedy attempts to add to and complicate Limon’s theories. To do so, I employ arguments from performance studies and autobiographical theory to better understand what stand-up comedy is and does, particularly in Cho’s case. I argue that Cho’s performances are multivalent, with abjection only being one part of the whole. Furthermore, it is the multivalent nature of Cho’s performances that simultaneously accounts for her political potency and failures—a scaled-down version of the larger political paradoxes currently at work, which are the unresolvable tensions of identity politics.

  

Oscillating: (Not) the Self and (Dis)Identification

Abjection is certainly not only what is ‘stood up’ in Margaret Cho’s performances. To focus only on external renderings would be to implicitly state that there is no agency whatsoever for she who is marked abject. Cho uses the confessional moments of her stand-up act to expose oppression that usually goes unnoticed, and paints the practices of mainstream media networks as absurd, reconfiguring what is abject, which is politically powerful. In I’m the One That I Want, Cho recalls an interview at a critics convention: “Ms. Cho, isn’t it true that the network asked you to lose weight to play the part of yourself, on your own TV show?” As a response to Cho’s retelling, the audience laughs, not because the statement is inherently funny, but because Cho’s presentation highlights the truth and absurdity the question raises. Although she turns a very serious situation into a joke, she never loses sight of its gravity. We, as her audience, are nervous because we don’t know whether to laugh at or cry for Cho’s oppression, which we may or may not identify with. We might move, like Cho, from one extreme response to the other in her stand-up comedy performance. DoVeanna Fulton, describing a similar but significantly different phenomenon, argues that “Black comediennes on the ‘Def Comedy Jam’ confront traditional gender constructs. Adele Givens, one of the most popular women to appear on the show, uses what has become her signature line, ‘I’m such a fucking lady,’ in direct opposition to societal norms of what a lady does and does not say” (Fulton, 84). Like Givens, Cho also rejects social constructions of the normative by refusing to be preoccupied with her own weight, and more. Although Cho admits that she wasn’t always as comfortable with her self, which is significant to her story.

     Margaret Cho’s acts are forms of autobiography.[1] James Olney’s “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment” recognizes that “the act of autobiography is at once a discovery, a creation, and an imitation of the self” (Olney, 19). That is, Olney argues that autobiography is an imaginative, rather than transparent, mimesis of the life as lived. In Cho’s case, the memories of horrible experiences she tells are constructions with purposes; they aren’t simply abject anecdotes, nor do they only undermine hegemony (which I will address in my next section). They do and don’t simultaneously, on different levels. Cho organizes her memories to form a narrative intended to make us laugh and/or cry, and understand her as someone who struggled but grew to accept herself. Autobiography’s theoretical canon recognizes the recurrent political use of personal narratives. Slave narratives are important historical examples, highlighted by theorist Sidonie Smith: “the fact is that both the final accommodation of the black self to his society and the radical breakthrough to personal freedom (an acceptance of self-determination within limitations) are achieved through the act of writing autobiography” (Smith, 180). A recent example is Faith Ringgold’s artist autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge, which is a bildungsroman of an African-American artist, who through her text is able to archive her life and prints of her artwork in a single book. In it, image and text support one another, which, because of the lack of attention given to women artists of color, is also a political act marking her self visible and present. The stand-up comedy mode of performance, an embodied form of autobiography, gives Margaret Cho a place to be visible—she can construct herself, on her own terms. The comedienne puts her life stories to political use, like the black women of “Def Comedy Jam,” offering performed narrative exposés that subvert the visibly mainstream.

The imaginative nature of autobiography, when performed, is a unique form of Richard Schechner’s concept of the ‘not not’ in performance. Schechner says, “While performing, a performer experiences his own self not directly but through the medium of experiencing the others. While performing, he no longer has a ‘me’ but has a ‘not not me,’ and this double negative relationship also shows how restored behavior is simultaneously private and social (Schechner 111-112). The stand-up comic, then, when she tells a story of her own self and/or performs her self enacts a case of this ‘not not’ phenomenon. When Cho performs herself from the past, the person on stage is not her (from the past) and not not her (from the past), and at the same time, Cho is not herself (at that moment) and not not herself (at that moment) as well. Also taking place in this performance of the self is the identification or disidentification with the past self through its construction. An example of a self disidentification is when Cho recalls responding to boyfriend Quentin Tarantino’s warning “Don’t let them take away your voice.’ Cho’s represents her old self as a naïve youth, responding “but I’m a size four!” in an obnoxiously high voice. The performance demonstrates the act’s qualities of disidentification and ‘not not,’ all of which fit into the larger trajectory of her story of struggle to success.

            Cho’s (dis)identifications are not only directed to her self. As part of her comedic act, Margaret Cho does ‘impressions’ of various people or stereotypes, such as her mother or dumb heterosexual men. She both acts and ‘incorporates’ them, the latter term being Schechner’s understanding of Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘hypernaturalistic’ performance work. Schechner correctly argues that Smith does not parody the real people she takes on as characters, whereas Cho does and doesn’t, mostly depending on whether or not the comedienne identifies with the character she plays. Like Smith, Cho’s performances stitch many voices together that might not normally converse with one another. For example, Margaret Cho is well-known for performing her mother on stage, often based on her random and funny telephone messages. The mother performances are at once a loving incorporation of the her maternal role and off-the-wall wisdom, as well as Cho’s disidentification with the less-assimilated Asian(-American) figure, in this case, of an older generation. For example, in I’m the One that I Want, Cho’s face tilts back, her eyes squint and bottom lip juts out, and she is no longer her self. The audience cheers because they know who she is playing at that moment. Cho’s voice drops and she speaks in the thick Korean accent of her mother: “Uh. I have to tell you something. Grandma and-uh Grandpa gonna die. I don’t know when they gonna die. But sometime.” The randomness of the mother’s phone message is funny, but the aesthetics Cho employ are also funny to her American audience, problematically. In a way, Cho is making fun of the ‘foreigner’ who is unable to assimilate into American culture, behaviorally and particularly linguistically, which contrastively asserts Cho’s own Americanness.

            However, beyond the aesthetics, the content of Cho’s performances of her mother are more venerable than her other performances of Asian people who are not from the U.S. For example, her mother has surprisingly progressive perspectives at times, such as with gays and lesbians, and is mostly supportive of Margaret. On the other hand, Margeret acts out more abstract characters of Asian stereotypes to reveal the absurdities of racial ignorance in the U.S. In Revolution, Cho discusses a flight attendant offering her a “chicken salad” hesitantly, after calling it an “Asian chicken salad” to everyone before her. The joke intensifies, when Cho performs an exaggerated form of what the man might have expected: she crouches to the ground and pretends to inspect the salad for real mandarins with ‘primitive’ gestures. In the parody of a stereotypical and ignorant form of ‘Asian,’ Cho challenges our notions of the stereotype in this act. However, there are moments when the aesthetics of ‘foreign Asian’ are presented as stereotypical and funny, such as a coy Asian schoolgirl giggle, which also has the potential to offend. When Cho does an exaggeratedly Asian dance in I’m the One that I Want, by sinuously waving her arms and floating across the floor, ironically telling us of how she grew up on rice and fish but still has a tendency to gain weight, therefore she “really hopes to catch malaria,” Cho is simultaneously undermining the stereotype, and also partially making fun of some Asian aesthetics and traditions, further Othering those forms. Cho identifies as Asian-American, and asserts this through her performances of identification and disidentification with other types of Asian-ness.

 

            For the encore of I’m the One That I Want, Margaret Cho transforms into her mother organizing the gay porn section of their family’s bookstore. The scenario of a Korean-born woman’s encounter with a magazine entitled “Assmaster” is hilarious, and Cho plays it up, exaggerating her mother’s hesitant opening of the magazine and then screaming shock because she saw “ass right away,” when she was expecting “table of content, then ass.” The encore presentation is one of the many encounters of Cho’s family with gay culture in San Francisco—one of strong significance to Cho’s identity. Cho declares herself to be a ‘fag hag,’ which is loosely defined as a heterosexual woman who identifies with gay male culture in the U.S. The complex relations of this identification are fascinating; traditionally gay men have learned ‘how to be gay'[2] through identifications with heterosexual women performers like Judy Garland and Joan Crawford, as ‘gayness’ was never explicitly represented. This relatively recent new form of identification, the fag hag, is an example of how social abjection (‘fag hags’ are often viewed as ‘tragic’ and not accepted in other social spheres) leads to new creative forms of cross-cultural identification. In Disidentifications, Jose Munoz talks about how on how people of color and queers manage to survive in social systems that prey on them and prefer they don’t exist. Through performance, these unlikely individuals often accomplish much more than just surviving. He says, “The practices of survival are, of course, not anything like intrinsic attributes that a subject is born with. More nearly, these practices are learned. They are not figured out alone, they are informed by the examples of others. These identifications with others are often mediated by a complicated network of incomplete, mediated, or crossed identification.” (Munoz, 38).[3] In her stand-up performances, Cho demonstrates her ‘insider’ status in gay male culture. Much of her humor is campy, and she creates humorous, fictive ‘fag and hag’ histories, such as women guiding gay men through the Underground Railroad. She argues that fag hags are “the backbone of the gay community,” but admits that gay men are the worst friends at bars, since they leave their companions for sex in an instant. Cho performs gay men well, offering a rare case of a performance of gay men, that does not mock them, by someone who is not a gay man; usually, gay men identify with others via performance. Her voice changes to a ‘San Francisco accent,’ and her jokes are those that would appeal to gays, told in ways identified with the culture. For example, in The Notorious C.H.O., she talks about her drag queen guardian angels, and their always-critical posthumous comments about her make-up and sex techniques. Through these performances, Cho identifies with gay male culture and cements her ‘fag hag’ identity, which further cements her Asian-American identity (emphasis again on American). This cross-cultural identification, from one abject case to another, brings Cho many gay male fans, and amplifies empathy from those audience members who might not share her Intersectionality.[4] Cho touches on this identification in an interview preceding a filmed version of Notorious C.H.O., when she says “it’s very moving to see so many different people in my audience. It means a lot to me because it’s like I feel like I really identify with them, too. And we get a lot of comfort from each other. I don’t think that what I do for some people is just entertainment.” Abjection is not only ‘stood up’ in Cho’s work, as only anecdotal; beyond Limon’s theories, the stand-up mode and display of abjection enables: (dis)identifications, constructions of identities and stereotypes, and inversions of what is abject—all of which are politically potent and active engagements.

 

 

Oscillating: (Un)Marked and (Non-)Normative

In Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, Limon states that abjection in stand-up comedy involves self type-casting. Despite an audience’s suspension of disbelieve, one’s social roles and body cannot ultimately be sloughed. In I’m the One That I Want, Margaret Cho poignantly says “for me to be ten pounds thinner is a full-time job, and I am handing in my notice and walking out the door!” The statement comes near the end of her act, and Cho looks almost as if she experienced all her life’s pain first-hand during the hour-and-a-half long performance. By rejecting the ‘totally unattainable skinny ideal’ that she has been grappling with her whole life, Cho is claiming pride in her own non-normativity. She also dramatically puts her own body on display as she is ‘freeing’ it, like the producers who criticized her weight before, but on her own terms, at that moment. Years later, in her Revolution tour, however, Cho has noticeably lost weight. Audience members scrutinize Cho for potentially resorting back to the hyperreal body image she once rejected, and Cho does not address the issue of weight in this performance like she did her previous ones. We also see a thinner Cho on her Notorious C.H.O. CD cover. Once a form of empowerment, Cho’s bringing attention to her own body is now a major component of the criticism of her work. But I would argue that we should not judge her so harshly and quickly; Cho does not embody an ideal female form even when she is ‘thin,’ and does not advocate dieting or unhealthy weight-loss habits. By making the bold statements about body image that Cho did in 2000, we are inclined to hold her to a previous construction of her self, which is problematic and oppressive. Nevertheless, Cho’s basis for empowerment at one point in her life is now perpetuating her oppression, and keeping her body under scrutiny. Similarly, Cho says that we should perpetuate the stereotype that gay men have ‘hot bodies,’ which at once subverts mainstream notions of gays, but further limits them and makes effeminacy and ‘ugliness’ seem even more abject. Such is the nature of visibility and identity politics on the larger scale. Ideally, it wouldn’t matter what Cho’s, or anyone else’s, body looks like, and oscillations towards and away from normative ideals would go unnoticed; but the markedness makes it matter.

 

            Limon argues that “American abjectness taken to its extreme is a craving for abstraction” (Limon, 6). I interpret his use of the word ‘abstraction,’ to be related to Peggy Phelan’s ideas of the unmarked. [5] Unmarkedness, or ‘abstraction,’ can transcend the rigid limitations of markedness, unlike Cho in relation to her non-normative body. Unmarkedness exists in both extremes: white heterosexual men rarely feel limited by their Intersectionalities, and conversely the anomalous and abstract are not fixed by rigid categorization. I wouldn’t agree wholly with Limon’s point, as markedness is an experiential mode with potency and problematics different from unmarkedness, but both have them nonetheless. Visibility does paradoxically empower and constrain marginalized people, which we know, of course, as the unresolvable tension of identity politics. I thus argue that in stand-up comedy, there is both a craving for abstraction and the abject, an oscillation, because the abject is often the comic’s motivation and an empowering medium of her performance. Probably the most memorable and moving performance of Margaret Cho’s career takes place at the end of I’m the One That I Want, when her narrative depicts her lifetime low, when she becomes a hopeless alcoholic and drug user who is “long dead.” She says, exhausted, yet still managing to shout:

I am not gonna die! I am not gonna die because my sitcom got cancelled. And I am not gonna die because some producer tried to take advantage of me. And I am not gonna die because some network executive thought I was fat. It’s so wrong… I am not gonna die because I failed as someone else. I am gonna succeed as myself. And I’m gonna stay here, and rock the mike until the next Korean-American, fag hag, shit-starter, girl-comic, trash-talker, comes up and takes my place!

 

With this exclamatory claiming of identity and resistance, Cho is met with screaming applause. The audience is captivated by her self-acceptance, and she is empowered by such markings. But by marking herself at that moment, she paradoxically empowers her current self only to limit her later self.

 Because they seem to be presently inescapable aspects of identity politics, we should not limit our understanding of Cho’s performances only by what we might see as failures or attempts to be normative. Cho’s more recent projects of visibility are interesting (and equally as problematic) interrogations of cultural ideologies. The images on the cover of her Notorious C.H.O. CD undermine hegemonic configurations of beauty and glamour, along with other ‘fourth wave’ feminist approaches to feminine power in a capitalist and hyperreal society. Similarly, the poster for the Notorious C.H.O. film shows Cho as an aggressive woman taking on a stereotypical role of the Asian ‘Other,’ but simultaneously breaking away from it, rendering her as a woman to reckon with. In the Che Guevara image I discuss at the beginning of my essay, Cho reclaims her face defined as grotesque by the television network and makes it a symbol of resistance.

I have been to each of Margaret Cho’s three stand-up comedy acts in person, and own the two video recordings that are available. Each of the live shows felt like simultaneously like watching well-produced entertainment and like attending a grassroots political rally. Cho’s oscillating performances now draw very large crowds, and she has shifted her emphasis from her own story to larger-scale political activism. We can see this on her website, www.margaretcho.com, where she gives regular political updates through the “Watch Our Cho!” video segment, accompanied by her Black Gay friend, Bruce Daniels. Cho’s videos perform as alternatives to mainstream news programs that might represent the political moment differently than she. Cho uses the website particularly to advocate the legalization of gay marriage, on margaretcho.com, as well as her site www.loveisloveislove.com, devoted completely to the political cause. Thus Cho uses her influence, gained through her performative stand-up acts, beyond the stage and towards ‘real’ mobilization. Cho uses the hyperreal mass media to speak to a larger audience than she had in 2000. Of course, the cause she endorses is problematic like the other projects of identity politics I mention earlier; the legalization of gay marriage would at once empower the group and brings them closer to equal rights, yet it would also draw them further into hegemonic constraints, pulling them away from the power of the unmarked and non-normative.

 

Conclusion: Full Circle

Margaret Cho’s current political influence in the U.S. is underscored by conservative protests to her shows, and network attempts to censor her (again). She posts links to hate mail she receives on her website. Such letters read (I separate letters with two hyphens):

Cho’s hate mail and website project bring up issues that extend beyond the scope of this project. They are, however, examples of where the stand-up comedy mode of performance has brought her. She began with I’m the One That I Want as severely abjected and close to death, but now is a nationally-recognized political figure, not escaping her marginalized role but mobilizing it offstage, rendering the Guevara appropriation at least somewhat appropriate.

 In her stand-up comedy, then, Margaret Cho displays her abjection, oscillates to and from it, and puts it to use, catapulting her out into a powerful role in the real world. Cho’s performances exhibit the problematics of identity politics on the micro level, and her more recent non-stand-up endeavors show Cho’s engagement with these problematic issues on the macro level. What is most clear is that abjection isn’t only put on display through Cho’s spoken word or performances. The stand-up mode, and productive use of abjection significantly empowers the performer, as the abject performance genre itself gives her a space to construct identities and subvert/invert oppressions. With limitations in mind, Margaret Cho’s work is made up of complex agencies and oscillations. The success of her projects are shown by the large audience she has, waiting to see and hear what she does next.

 

Notes