Margaret Cho Gets Musical ... Plus: Win a Chance to Meet Her in Anaheim!!!

The funny lady waxes poetic about her first comedy-music album

By Nona Willis Aronowitz
Published: August 30th, 2010 | 11:25am

Margaret Cho is best known for her balls-out political comedy, but she’s been hard at work on her first album of comedy songs, called Cho Dependent. The album, out August 24, features a bevy of her folksy music friends like Ani DiFranco, Tegan and Sara, and Patty Griffin, and tackles anything from murderous ex-crushes to camel toe. Cho tells us about comedy-therapy, why funny women have it harder, and the secret desires of rock stars.

How did the concept for the album get started?

I had been wanting to do it for a long time. I’m a musician, but I’m not a really strong one and don’t know much about composition. So I enlisted all the people I know who are great at that—people like Fiona Apple, Patty Griffin, Andrew Bird, Ben Lee. I wanted to do an album that was comedy but at the same time had a lot of enduring value musically, something that would go beyond song parodies.

I think of some of those people as pretty serious and brooding. How’d they fare with making jokes?

Well, all comics want to be rock stars, and all rock stars want to be comics. It’s a very common thing that we want to trade places. Rock stars are fond of telling jokes in between songs. So even though a lot of them have serious personae, they also have a well-developed sense of humor.

But some of the songs had serious themes, right? Something about a murder?

Right, the song “I’m Sorry” [written with Andrew Bird]. It’s about somebody who I fell in love with working on [the television show] All-American Girl. I liked him and he didn’t like me back and it was the first time I was really heartbroken. I lost touch with him—I never Googled him or anything because I didn’t want to know if he was happy in his life. I figured he was married and had a bunch of kids and was super successful. But when I turned 40, I thought, ‘I still think about this guy, I should look him up and see what he’s doing.’ I Googled him and his Wikipedia entry came up—that he was a writer on All-American Girl, and that in 2007 he was convicted of the murder of his wife. He bludgeoned her to death, and stuffed her in the attic, and left her there for a month until she had partially mummified.

Um, whoa.

I know. This was not some acquaintance, this was someone I loved for over 17 years. It could have been me. But on the other hand, it couldn’t have been me. I mean, I was rejected! I couldn’t even get murdered!

The only way to endure painful things like that is to rise above it with a dark humor. It’s not like you’re making fun of it exactly, but you have to make fun of yourself. For me, it’s “What’s wrong with me that I so loved this crazy person?” In a sense, that’s the soul of country music—the tragedy of relationships, the horror of domestic violence. It’s a true American murder ballad. I had to forgive myself for something that I had no control over, and find some levity in there. That’s the job of comedians.

Any other favorites on the album?

I love “Hey Big Dog” with Patty Griffin. It’s a duet between me and my dog, and Fiona Apple provides the voice of the dog. It’s about people problems versus dog problems. It’s my trying to understand why he’s afraid of the wind, and it’s my dog asking, “Why are you always waiting by the phone for that man that I hate? Don’t let him come around.” People and their animals are so close and that relationship is never applauded. I sang it to him as he was dying—it was a very soothing thing.

Listening to these two stories reminds me of that part in the Joan Rivers documentary, where Melissa Rivers says that comedians are all fundamentally damaged. Was that a little harsh, or do you agree?

I love her—Joan, I mean. Comedians are the most put-upon of entertainers. We have to cause a reaction in the audience, they’re not allowed to just sit back and enjoy it, they have to physically erupt into something. And it’s harder for women, because the community is not supportive of female comics. We have to be so much better and funnier than the guys to get anywhere.

So there’s an amount of therapy that happens in comedy. There’s a constant need to expose something that’s really intimate—the greatest comedians do that. I do think there’s a lot of mental consciousness happening. I don’t know about damage, though.

WIN A CHANCE TO MEET MARGARET!!!

Venus Zine is giving away a pair of tickets to her September 23 show at the Grove of Anaheim in Anaheim, CA to one lucky winner, who will also get the chance to meet Margaret after the show! Two runners-up will receive a copy of the CD. CLICK HERE to enter.