lifestyles
Margaret Cho
The Korean-American comic brings her unique insights to the Lied Center in her first trip to Kansas
By Nathan Olson Features editor
On television, she plays a directionless twenty-something with too much time on her hands. In real life, however, Margaret Cho is just the opposite.
Cho, 26, began her career at The Rose and Thistle, a comedy club upstairs from her parents' bookstore in San Francisco. During her breaks from working in the bookstore, Cho performed standup.
After high school and a brief stint at San Francisco State University, Cho decided that comedy was her calling.
"I made a really good living as a standup," she said in a recent telephone interview.
But there were sacrifices.
"It was tough because I was on the road by myself at age 18 and 19," she said. "I was alone at a time when you least want to be alone."
Cho eventually became well-
Cho eventually became we known enough that she appeared on "Star Search" and on the short-lived TV show "Angie," in which she played a nurse with a heavy British
accent.
Her current show, "All-American Girl," grew out of her experiences growing up. In the show, Cho plays the middle daughter of a Korean family that owns a bookstore in San Francisco.
The show has received mixed reviews. Some see the portrayal of Asian Americans on television as a positive step. Others think the show doesn't go far enough. Writing in the Los Angeles Times last fall, Darrell Hamamoto, a lecturer at California State University in Long Beach, complained that the show was neither better nor worse than most other situation comedies.
"What rankles most is the underlying assumption that people of Asian descent living in the United States are somehow less than 'All- American,'" Hamamoto wrote. "The very title of the program begs the question." Cho believes that the show is simply that: a show
It neither creates nor obliterates stereotypes, she said.
But Cho does feel a personal responsibility as an Asian American.
"I sometimes feel a sense of pressure," she said.
"I have to deal with so much more than other people think about. I have the weight of all Asian Americans."
Part of that pressure comes from television, a medium Cho thinks has less movement and is more stressful than standup comedy.
The pressure occasionally is difficult to deal with.
"I'm not a natural leader," she says. "I wouldn't want others to live the life I've led."
Cho said she had a few comedy idols, such as Bill Hicks, when she was a child. Her favorite comedian is Garry Shandling.
Cho said she didn't think many of today's comedians, other than Shandling and a few established comedians, were very funny.
"He doesn't care that people are stupid," she said. "He understands that it isn't about playing to the masses. It's having integrity about who you are."
Cho believes that his show, "The Garry Shandling Show," is funny in part because its level of humor is more sophisticated than that found on network television.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
LEAD STORY
POLICE BLOTTER
In February, the defense minister of Sweden acknowledged that the Russian submarine intrusions into Sweden's waters that had so preoccupied the military for the past three years actually were the activities of frolicking minks. The minister blamed the error on hydrophonic equipment installed in 1992.
Dominic McDonnell and Cathy Snelson were married in London in July, just weeks after they had met while they were arrested during a raid on a local bar. They had spent two hours chatting, sitting on the floor with their hands tied behind their backs, while police sorted out which suspects they wanted and which were innocent. The couple was released and began dating immediately.
Among the weapons reportedly used recently in robberies: a spray bottle of toilet cleaner, pointed at a shopkeeper in Norwich, Ontario; in December; a manhole cover, brandished by a street mugger in Chicago in February; and a pitchfork, wielded by one of two men in the robbery of a market in Greensboro, N.C., in October.
■ On the other hand, recent attempted thefts were foiled by victims wielding a large spatula and oven scrub brush in the aborted robbery of a pizzeria in Dayton, Ohio, in Decem.
ber, a can of Raid,
used by a home-
owner in Stark
County, Ohio, in
December to
momentarily
blind a burglar.
In July in Seattle, FBI
agents arrested Johnny Madison Williams Jr. and his wife, Carolyn, on bank robbery and gun charges. According to the FBI, the couple kept a record of their bank robberies, one entry per heist. According to the record, the Williamsms pulled off 56 robberies in eight years, totaling nearly $900,000.
In September, David Lynn Justice, 21, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in Houston, for kidnapping two women and forcing them to buy him Twinkies and NoDoz.
COINCIDENCES
In November 1973, Madison County, Ind., prosecutor William Lawler obtained a conviction against 18-year-old Rodney Cummings for burglary, a charge for which Cummings served a three-year probation. Cummings recovered from his rocky start to become a police officer and a lawyer, and in the November 1994 elections, he knocked Lawler out of his job in a close race.
Bob Bormack's billboard marriage proposal to Teri Ungar in October in Wood Dale, Ill., was accepted. "Teri, Please Marry Me! Love, Bob." However, the billboard company reported that 10 other women with the name "Teri," who were dating men named Bob, inquired whether the message was for them – including one Teri who was dating two men named Bob.
In December, according to police, Cliff Brown shot his estranged wife in the head three times and then took his own life in a quiet neighborhood in Georgetown, Texas. The neighborhood had returned to normal since 1989, when the couple that previously owned the Brown's house had also suffered a tragedy in which the wife was shot to death and the husband — the only suspect — had killed himself days later.
LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINAL
A 31-year-old woman was arrested in Antioch, Calif., in February after she walked into the police station carrying a bag of methamphetamine she said she wanted tested because she thought her boyfriend had added hallucinogens to it.