Margaret Cho, stand-up comic, on Hong Kong lessons, Trump jokes, and the value of courting danger in Singapore
Korean-American stand-up comedian who’s making her second Asian tour talks about how comedy helps us through the absurdity of the Trump era and why making ‘joke about something it’s impossible to joke about’ is important
Margaret Cho has been at the top of the stand-up comedy game for a couple of decades, but the Asian-American is making only her second professional visit to Asia this month, for shows in Hong Kong (on May 13), Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The dates are part of her “Fresh off the Bloat” tour, which began last year.
Stand-up comedian Arj Barker returns to Hong Kong with sharpest material honed during performances in Australia
The outspoken Korean-American comic, known for material that is both intensely political and candidly personal – often making jokes out of subjects most other comedians wouldn’t touch, such as rape and child abuse, both of which she is a survivor of – also visited Hong Kong the first time she toured Asia, in 2016.
“I learned a lot,” she says. “I was always really intrigued by Hong Kong; I’m a big John Woo fan. It was really exciting to actually go to Chungking Mansions and be in the midst of this world that I’d only seen in the movies. I also ate a lot of goose.”
Perhaps surprisingly, given the no-holds-barred nature of her material, she also visited Singapore on that tour – and has been invited back.
“It was fine,” she says of performing there. “I was recently talking to [similarly candid comedian] Kathy Griffin on the day she was performing in Singapore, and she was worried she was going to be too outrageous; I told her to just be herself.
“People were shocked when I performed there but at the same time it’s just comedy – how serious can it be? You want to court that kind of danger; I think it’s really valuable.”