Margaret Cho on Tattoos, The Election, and Her Triumphant Return to Music
Armed with an unapologetic, no holds barred approach to comedy, Margaret Cho has blazed an unparalleled trail as one of the most influential and fearless figures in entertainment.
A multi-talented Korean American comedian, actress, writer, singer, musician, and activist known for her bold, unfiltered humor and sharp social commentary, Cho rose to fame in the early 1990s with her groundbreaking stand-up comedy and her ABC sitcom All-American Girl, the first network TV show to feature an Asian American family.
Challenging stereotypes and breaking down barriers for marginalized communities, Cho has become an outspoken pioneer across multiple decades, using her platform to address issues that include race, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity.
Whether she’s on stage, in front of the camera, or advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, Cho continues to be a powerful voice for inclusivity, self-expression, and social justice.
Her latest single, “Lucky Gift,” explores the polarity of “feeling ugly, but falling in love anyway,” triumphantly celebrating the contradictions of life and cherishing silver linings through the doubt.
KP: To start on a light note in these very dark times, I was trying to think of the first time I was ever introduced to you or your work. Funny enough, when I was about 12 or 13, I first saw you on LA Ink, actually.
MC: Oh, wow.
KP: Yeah, and I remember you talking about how hot Kat [Von D] was and how she kept touching you with the stencil. [Laughs]. It's so funny. And I also remember being, like, damn it, I'm so jealous. [Laughs]. But my girlfriend is an incredible tattoo artist here at Bang Bang in New York, so I've grown such a deep love and appreciation for tattoos through her work. You have so many tattoos and I just think they complement you so well.
MC: Aw, thank you.
KP: Do you have a favorite or is there any tattoo backstory that means a lot to you?
MC: Well, you know, all of them are really just from growing up within tattoo culture. My parents owned a gay bookstore and a lot of the employees that worked there were gay – they were getting full bodysuits by Ed Hardy in the 70s. So I grew up around really incredibly tattooed people like in the 70s and 80s when it wasn't widespread – it was very different. I just always knew that I would be one of these heavily tattooed people.
And so when I was ready, my longtime friend that worked for my father, he took me to Ed Hardy to get my first really big tattoo on my stomach and my back, which was like the beginning, and I have a kind of a full bodysuit now.
So yeah, it's just a big part of my life. I took a break and I started getting tattooed again last year by this amazing artist from Korea named Oozy, who's really incredible.
There's no real significance to any one particular tattoo – for me it's more just the collective experience of being tattooed. And also all of the people that I had the honor to work with, all of the artists, are good friends of mine. So that in itself is a great thing to be able to carry their work with me.
KP: I love that. And so, unfortunately, to move on to something a little more somber, we just had an election take place here in America. And it was not the first time, but the second time that our country should have voted in a woman as president – which I believe we need so much as a nation.
MC: We need it so much.
KP: We need it so much. We need a really well-formed frontal lobe in office.
MC: Yeah.
KP: And we chose to elect an alleged rapist instead. Our country could have chosen women's choice, and instead we once again chose women's mandates. You just took place in a Fight Misogyny with Comedy event last night, which I'm sure was incredible.
MC: Yes.
KP: But it got me thinking about comedy and how sometimes that's the only thing that we really have left – the only thing that we can weaponize and find any joy in, because if you don't laugh, you'll cry, right?
MC: Absolutely.
KP: So I guess I want to leave this open-ended, for you to speak to that as a legendary comedian – the ways in which our country can violate us so terribly, but also the ways in which we can salvage joy to heal.
MC: Well, thank you. Men hate a bitchy, funny woman – that's the one thing that they hate, and that's the one thing that they can't get over. They can't shut us up. So we have to keep on laughing at them, keep on making fun of them. It's the only way we can dismantle the patriarchy, because the structures of it are such that even the most qualified woman can't get through the gate because she's a woman, you know?
KP: Absolutely.
MC: It seems that the country would rather ruin itself and functionally commit suicide than have a woman leading them, which is exactly what I think the nation has done. I think that it's subconscious, but it would rather self-immolate than submit to a woman. And that's really too bad, because it's its own fault.
I think that this is the beginning of the end for the United States in a lot of ways, but maybe it can be the end to a new beginning. I think that we have to sort of tear down these structures of patriarchy and rape culture and misogyny in order to find our way through it. But there’s going to be quite a lot of suffering before we get there, which unfortunately will come at the cost of women's lives, which, you know, is awful.
“It seems that the country would rather ruin itself and functionally commit suicide than have a woman leading them, which is exactly what I think the nation has done. I think that it’s subconscious, but it would rather self-immolate than submit to a woman. And that’s really too bad, because it’s its own fault.”
KP: Yeah. It’s a big, big price to pay. Similarly though, you posted an incredible reel to Instagram about Brownie Mary, who is a cannabis rights activist and volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, who provided over 600 brownies a day to patients who were terminally ill during the height of the AIDS crisis. She ultimately got arrested for her compassion. But you spoke of how we as queer people “fight the system in unexpected and beautiful ways, which is the key to our survival, our resilience, our sanity, and our hope.” Again, it's something that I kind of want to leave open-ended for you to expand on, just in terms of community mobilization or even just survival. It's an incredibly touching sentiment that I just wanted to share with our readers.
MC: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm such a fan of grassroots activism, and Brownie Mary is exactly that. I don't want stories like hers to get lost in history. Those are the stories that we need to remember and carry on. You know, it's so important. But there are, like, micro-revolutions that happen. This past weekend – I think it was in Ohio or Iowa – they had, like, a mass gay wedding, which I think is so great.
KP: Oh, really? I didn't see that.
MC: Yeah! Like 600 couples got married really quickly just to make sure to be ahead of the proposed Project 2025.
KP: Right.
MC: Just to make sure their rights are protected with their partners. And so events like that kind of between now and January 20th are really inspiring. People taking things into their own hands and trying to figure out how we can make the laws work for us right now and be more informed about what the laws actually mean and how we can use them to our advantage.
So, you know, it's like remembering history – looking to the past and remembering that we've been here before and we've actually been worse off. Much worse off.
KP: Right.
MC: There are ways to fight it – we have so much at our disposal. We have technology, which we didn't have that back then in the 80s. Early AIDS activists didn't have the reach that we have. So there are definitely positive things that can be done. We're just going to have to be really resourceful to figure out what those are.
KP: Yeah, absolutely. And in that reel, you also spoke about your sobriety, which is incredibly admirable, and it's something that I believe, particularly in this climate, that so many people – specifically women – struggle with, since we can use so many substances just to try to smooth out those cracks that we feel on the surface of everyday life, both in our own personal worlds, but also life now as an American in this country.
What are some words of advice that you would lend to women who are looking to either get sober or embark on that journey for the first time?
MC: Well, I mean, I think it would be a real help for everyone to just wake up to what's going on, you know? And if that includes sobriety, I think that's the ultimate way to be really aware about what's happening.
And also, when you're sober, you're really not tolerant of abuse. You're not tolerant of situations that don't serve you. You're not tolerant of microaggressions. You become very much an advocate for yourself, which I think my sobriety has really done for me.
So, I mean, I think for anybody, it's a great improvement in your life, but also, especially now – when we need awareness more than ever – I think it could be a really important tool for change.
KP: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm someone who never really felt a very maternal instinct. I'm incredibly empathetic, possibly to a fault, and I love mentoring young girls, but I never felt any maternal instinct to babies, even from the time I was very young. But you have famously said that when you see children, “[you] feel nothing. [You] have no maternal instinct. [You] ovulate sand.” [Laughs] I relate to that very deeply. But being a childless woman is also weaponized in society today, especially with the leaders that we have coming into office. Have you ever felt personally victimized by this mentality as a woman throughout your life? And, again, what advice or strength do you think you could lend to women who are often ridiculed for being childless?
MC: Well, I think it's a weird thing to criticize for somebody. Like, why didn't you multiply? Like, why should I? I don't want to. I don't understand what the point is in that.
KP: Well, you know what? It's funny to me, too, when people say that they find it so selfish for people to be childless, I can flip that – I also think it's kind of selfish for people to have children, in a sense, to want it, to feel this need or impulse to continue their bloodline. They want to see themselves multiply. And I never understood why that isn't looked at as well. I totally agree with you.
MC: Right? It's bizarre.
KP: It's totally bizarre.
MC: I don't ever feel as if I have less of a voice because I don't have children. I don't think that it really takes away from my power or any of that. Like, I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful not to have children. I'm so grateful not to have to.
I mean, the ultimate reason is that I just don't want to love anybody like that – that's the truth of it. And I don't find that to be anything negative about my character, it's just an actual choice. Like, I made the decision that I don't want to be beholden to somebody else because they came out of my body. I'm already beholden to my cats and my dog. Like, I'm so a real slave slash parent to these fur babies. I couldn't imagine doing the same for a person – no way.
KP: Pets are enough. [Laughs]. But onto your work. You're releasing your first album in eight years on February 14th, Lucky Gift – congratulations.
MC: Thank you.
KP: You just released the title track from that record as a single. You've said that it's your favorite song that you've ever written, which made me so happy to hear – it's such a fulfilling feeling to love your work.
MC: Yes, it really is.
KP: Can you talk us through a little bit on its development and production? What is it exactly that makes it your favorite?
MC: Well, the song just talks about when you feel ugly, but you fall in love anyway. And I think it's just so fun to realize that we can feel all of these negative things about ourselves, but we're still able to totally feel great and be in love. It's just so fun.
And the song was made from a really weird instrument that I came across a while ago – it's a mandolin guitar and it's double neck. I love a double neck guitar. It's such a very strange instrument. I play both of them in the song and then play them together simultaneously.
That's how I was able to compose the music for it – using these instruments against each other in a way that was totally different that I'd never done before, because I didn't have like the ability to play two things at once. So it was the ingenious nature of the instrument itself that kind of wrote the song, which I really am appreciative of.
KP: I'm a guitarist as well. Does it play very similarly to a guitar? Is it a six-string?
MC: Yeah, so it's a six-string on top, and then it's the eight-string mandolin on the bottom. So I was able to strum the whole thing at once. It's one giant thing, but you play while just fretting the guitar neck. So I was doing open tuning for the mandolin, and then I was able to kind of just play it together. It's a unique sound.
KP: Yeah, it is.
MC: And I’ve never seen a guitar mandolin, so I was really taken by this. And it was from a luthier from Nashville who died – his widow went to Gruhn Guitars, which is that legendary shop there – she sold all of his guitars that he made, and this was one of them.
It looks like if you took a chocolate bar and left it in the car and it melted together. [Laughs]. Because the guitar is like chocolate and the mandolin is caramel. It’s like this weird candy bar, but it's really a great instrument. So that's why I love the song.
KP: So interesting. That's awesome. And I got to listen to the album in advance, too. I love it so much. It's just warm and dreamy. “Stevie” was a favorite of mine.
MC: Oh, thank you.
KP: I know that the album won't be live when this runs, so everyone will have to wait a little while, but can you just speak a little bit on the album itself and what we can expect from it?
MC: Well, it's songs that were from over a 10-year period. When Robin Williams died, I put together outreach for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco called Be Robin, where we would go to these encampments and then play music on the street because Robin was a big advocate for those experiencing homelessness.
So we were out there trying to make some sense of our grief about it, you know, his suicide and also raising money and bringing much needed food and supplies to these camps out there and also playing music – like stealing electricity and playing music.
So a lot of the songs – there's a song about Robin Williams called “Funny Man” – it was very challenging to get a band out there since we had to get electricity for all of the instruments. And so there are horns on there, there are strings on there, it's really big. So we would have these street orchestras where we would just recruit musicians that we didn’t even know, but everyone would just come down and bring their instrument and we would just play. So that track was written out there. A bunch of different songs were written out there.
And then over time, you know, “Stevie” is a song about my beautiful meditation teacher who had to leave behind a feral cat colony because he was moving, and he couldn't bring the whole colony with him. [Laughs]. So it's just about how, you know, sometimes you just have to move along in your journey and say goodbye. You can't bring all the feral cats. [Laughs]. It’s really sad.
KP: Aw. Well like I said, I just feel it's so warm and inviting, but it has such beautiful tonality to it. I was really, really in love with it.
MC: Thank you!
“Men hate a bitchy, funny woman – that’s the one thing that they hate, and that’s the one thing that they can’t get over. They can’t shut us up.”
KP: But this album comes eight years after the release of your 2016 Grammy-nominated album, American Myth, that included the track “Anna Nicole,” which was written about your friendship with Anna Nicole Smith. She's someone that I always found deeply fascinating.
MC: Yes.
KP: And so incredibly misunderstood, as I usually think the best women always are.
MC: Absolutely.
KP: Is there anything that you learned from knowing her or anything that you'd care to share that people may not understand?
MC: Well, I think that she was just very much like our Marilyn Monroe. You know, she had an obsession with the archetype of Marilyn. And, you know, I think that she did live that out, in a very Y2K fashion. And she was just a very interesting figure in the world of social media – one of the first social media and television stars. And so, she has, in a sense, become more of a myth than a real person.
As a real person, she was almost like a walking myth. She was that kind of like person that had this incandescent quality that was so bright from within and beautiful, but also kind of surreal and almost not real. Beyond this earth, you know? There's a few people that you come across that have that energy. I think I felt that about her and Jeff Buckley had that quality. Mac Miller also had that quality. Lisa Marie Presley had that quality. There was something about them that were more myths than human, and you could almost sense it from them in the world when you were physically with them.
KP: It’s admirable. You were also just cast as one of the Gray Sisters alongside Sandra Bernhard in Disney's season two of Percy Jackson and The Olympians and also in Gregg Araki's upcoming film, I Want Your Sex, with Olivia Wilde and Charli XCX.
I know it's early yet, but is there anything that you can tell us about these roles or even the experiences of filming them?
MC: Oh, it was so great. Well, I love Sandra Bernhard. I'm a Bernhardtologist.
KP: [Laughs]. We spoke to her a few years ago. She's so cool.
MC: She's so cool. We have been in each other's orbits for the last quarter of a century, but I've never been able to fan out the way that I finally got to when I worked with her. I got to sit next to her and we shot all of our scenes in a cramped cab, so I got to just talk her ear off about all of the things that I love about her and all of her material, all of her movies, going on and on for a day. So it was so fun for me, but also for her to say like, “Oh, wow, you remember that?”
KP: That's great.
MC: I was like, oh my god, I know everything. So it was really, really fun. And I think that the show is really cool, so I'm looking forward for everybody seeing that. Also, we were with the incredible Kristen Schaal, who's also amazing.
And then the other movie – well, Gregg Araki, I’ve known him from when I was in Doom Generation, so I've known him forever. It was really exciting to be able to see him again and work on this incredible film with him, which is so cool.
Gregg was really in love with my dog, Lucia, so he asked me days before to make sure to bring Lucia onto the set, which I did. Lucia was just highly celebrated throughout the entire set. And Johnny Knoxville is also in the movie – he just kept screaming Lucia's name in between takes because he wanted to see her and be with her.
KP: That's so cute. It's great when the pets are appreciated. I think they should be appreciated the most.
MC: Always, always.
KP: And, for the last question, what do you feel makes a provocative woman?
MC: I think it's a woman who speaks her mind, who really tells the truth to herself and to others. A woman who really believes in herself, who really believes in the right things, and is not afraid to fight for them.
KP: That's a good answer. I agree with you completely.
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Photography (in order of appearance): Albert Sanchez, Sergio Garcia, Albert Sanchez
