Margaret Cho - They Told Me I Was Too Fat To Play Myself

0:00This month, we are partnering with Pink Lady Apples. When I was a kid, I was around gay men and lesbians and drag queens and people transitioning, people getting full body tattoos. This is in the 70s. That's why it was so upsetting when I started to kidnap people off of the street. People who look like me, people who are just like me, who are also all American. And it was so disturbing. I started taking fen-fen, which was like a 90s diet drug that was like speed. But you're being told that you don't look right to play yourself. What do you even say about that? You know, like you're too fat to be you.

0:42If anyone listening or watching this is going through some of the things that you've described, addiction, disordered eating, and they feel like there is no hope, what would you say to them? Margaret Cho is a pioneering comedian, actor, musician and advocate who describes herself as the patron saint of outsiders. Her parents were Korean immigrants who moved to America from Seoul in 1964. They opened a bookshop in San Francisco where Cho says she was raised by drag queens. It was a childhood punctuated by both enlightenment and trauma, and both have gone on to shape Cho's stand-up career, which she started with typical precocity at the age of 14.

1:32She won a comedy contest to open for Jerry Seinfeld, moved to LA in her 20s, and soon garnered a large and loyal following. Earlier this year, Vogue named Cho as one of their nine best female comedians of all time. Cho's comedy is famed for its blistering humour, fearlessness and acerbic political insight, qualities much in evidence on her latest tour, Choligarchy. Alongside comedy, Cho has starred in TV sitcoms, appeared in films such as Fire Island and Face Off and guested on everything from Sex and the City to 30 Rock. The latter earned her an Emmy nomination for her impersonation of Kim Jong-il.

2:14She's also a five-time Grammy-nominated musician, and her latest album, Lucky Gift, is, as one reviewer put it, a power pop romp. Offstage, Cho is a leading voice in the anti-racism movement Stop Asian Hate. She was bullied as a child and remembers wanting to look white. Despite her incredible success, these early experiences of shame have stayed with her. shame is such an electric emotion joe says it really ignites your history and gets to the core of who you are i think that's vital as an artist and also it improves your art if you can somehow rise above it margaret cho welcome to how to fail thank you what a great introduction thank you and i should really say margaret cho and lucia lucia katerina cho oh she's beautiful thank you she is beautiful.

3:12For anyone listening to this rather than watching, Lucia is a stunning chihuahua who's looking at me with such intelligence and compassion and I love her. Yeah, she's amazing. She's a really amazing girl. Can she sense people's energies? I think so. Are there certain people that she doesn't like? No, I don't think she dislikes people. She'll just not pay any attention to them. Okay. If she, maybe she senses something, she just kind of ignores them but moves on to people that she does like, which she obviously likes you. I feel very flattered. Wonderful. It's very wonderful. I found that quote that you gave on shame riveting.

3:51Oh, thank you. It's so interesting to look at shame in that way as a kind of fuel to drive creativity and art. Are there things that still cause you shame today? Yeah. I mean, what I think might be shameful is not picking up dog poo. That's your first failure. I know. The other day I didn't have a bag and I was really, really upset. And I went back to go pick up her poo and somebody had taken it. Somebody had actually cleaned it up for me. I thought there are angels. but it's it's like that kind of stuff i find deeply shameful when you're uh unable to do something society really needs you to do also i hate it when people leave dog shit out in the street like it really bothers me um and i will clean it up even if it's not hers so maybe somebody was also doing me a good turn because i've done it for so many others but um yeah something like that that i hate to see in life when i do it that's something that would cause me shame I'm fascinated by your childhood, and I know you're asked about it a lot, but this connection and tension, I imagine, between the enlightenment of San Francisco and also your Korean parents and the kind of cultural sense of who you were, and maybe there was a sense of wanting to be the quote-unquote model minority and how those two things connected.

5:18Can you speak to us a little bit about that? Well, I think there were a lot of really opposing things about my family and my family going into business with the gay community in San Francisco in the 70s because Korean culture is incredibly homophobic and patriarchal. And it's so odd that they decided to have a business in the middle of the most bustling gay neighborhood at that time in San Francisco. So I think it has to do with vanity. My father's extremely handsome and was not acknowledged as that when he came to America in 1964 because he was just an immigrant and they didn't look at immigrants as being handsome.

6:00And he was so crustfallen by the loss of that power until he went into the gay community where he got so much attention because the plain fact is that even though he was an immigrant, he was a beautiful man, which everybody took notice of. And I think these guys have flattered him and, you know, wanted to sell their business anyway and flirted with him. And he was just totally seduced by it, loved it, and went into business with them and kind of let go of all of the homophobia and kind of patriarchal nature that I think he had been born in and around and kind of took to, kind of rejected all of that.

6:45So when I was a kid, I was around gay men and lesbians and drag queens and people transitioning, people getting full body tattoos. This is in the 70s. So this is a very different kind of time. And it was really enriching, I guess. I mean, that's probably the word for it. It made me see a few things that gay is normal. Tattoos are just like skin and everybody is going to be OK. Hearing you talk about that childhood and now with your show Choligarchy addressing what America is in 2025, that must be a cause of personal anguish for you. It's very hard because, you know, I was raised with a lot of the values that Harvey Milk was talking about.

7:38Harvey Milk was the first openly elected gay official anywhere. And the people that worked for my father were early supporters of his. to be there for his assassination and to watch the rise after that of people overcoming that incredible tragedy. And then to then see gay marriage be legalized by the Supreme Court in 2015. It was just this incredible rise that you saw. We did that. We actually made that happen. And then to see America Now where they're covering up the rainbow flag They're actually trying to classify the rainbow flag as a hate symbol, not the swastika. The swastika is apparently not a hate symbol, according to Kristi Noem.

8:26But the rainbow flag is. It's really painful. So the show that I'm doing now is really trying to put the administration on, I guess, on notice. Like, we're not going to take this for much longer. And I feel like comedy actually had a lot to do with getting us into the situation with a lot of comedians signing off on what Trump was doing and applauding him just because they thought it was funny or a laugh. I don't think that any of them really seriously knew what would happen if he became president. I don't think any of them envisioned what's happening now or wanted what's happening now. But so I think that comedy got us into this.

9:14So comedy should get us out. I think that was such a sophisticated point. Beware of the politician dressed as a joke. Right. Because it's not funny. It's like people's lives are not funny. You know, when you're starving children, and that's a joke to you. 42 million people going without food, and that's a joke to you. Like, that's not funny. You know, when you're separating families, when you're putting people in concentration camps, and people are dying there. It's not a joke. It's not about America first. There is no America first. This is not America. This is something entirely different. And whatever your industry is, you have to apply whatever part of it to resistance that you can.

9:57So it's like a war effort. So I think all comedians were now going and working towards a greater good, which I think is really patriotic. There's this wonderful quote that you gave about the importance of humor. We are being taken over by the richest people in the world, but the only thing they cannot afford is jokes at their expense. Yeah, that's true. Oh, so good. When was the first time you realized you were funny? You know what? I still don't know if I am. I kind of just am stabbing in the dark at whatever. I don't really know. But I do know that I do think differently. And I think that is appealing to some people sometimes.

10:35So I don't know if it's funny, but I know that I have a mind that will work in a circuitous way. that can be amusing. But I don't know if that's actually funny. It's hard to define what funny actually is. Let's get into your failures because I want to give them enough time. Okay. They're so good. And one of the things I really appreciated was the lack of context. There was just a single phrase and I can't wait to get into the story. The first failure is getting your sitcom cancelled. Yes. Is this the sitcom All America? Yes. Okay. So tell us about how this sitcom came about? So I was lucky enough to be very, you know, very popular at a time in comedy where television was really getting very successful in making television shows around comedians, whether that was like Jerry Seinfeld as The Ultimate, but also Roseanne and Tim Allen and lots of different people like that.

11:31And so I was swept up in that. And because I was so different, because I was a young Asian American woman, it was really important for a studio to kind of get with me and develop a TV show. So I had a kind of an easy ride up to that point in getting the television show because they are all competing with each other and the networks all wanted to see who would be different. And what's more different than somebody that's racially different, that somebody who's young, somebody who had a success as a comedian, that they couldn't quite define, but they'd never seen it before. So they wanted to be a part of it.

12:08So I got this TV show. And then I realized though, a lot of the thing, the way that I define failure is a personal mismanagement. I don't think that this is actually for me a failure because a lot of the things that happened that resulted in the cancellation of the show were totally out of my hands. I was trying to do a television show in a space of, you know, other kind of TV-friendly families. I was never a TV-friendly comedian. They'd never shown my comedy at primetime. I was relegated to cable. I was a really foul-mouthed, very crass nightclub comedian. So they couldn't show any of that on television.

12:50So they had to do their own interpretation of whatever that is and also saddled with the idea of interpreting race and interpreting the other for such an inclusive format, which is sitcoms. Sitcoms are often about pairing the other with the familiar, and now you're totally going with the other. So how do we explain the life of the other? And the truth is, we're not that other. We're not that different. But it was the approach that I think the network took. We had special consultants from the university come to make sure that we were doing Asian right, which was because they saw consultants from NASA work on the television show Third Rock from the Sun, which is a very popular sitcom at the time about aliens.

13:45immigrants so extraterrestrials equaled immigrants that's what they thought we want to get this right this is 1994 yeah this is right okay okay carry on so they wanted to get it right and so there was all these things that that were miscalculations i wouldn't say they were mistakes or failures but it was just a number of miscalculations and also um an inherent need to want to explain Asian people to white people. That's kind of what it is. But the truth is, you don't really have to explain. You could just have to show, you know. So that's where I think the problem was. And you were in your 20s at this?

14:23I was 24. Okay. Was the title yours, All American Girl? All American Girl, I like the title because I still like the title because it was something that I've always felt and something that my parents would always say to me that you're you're all American. And, you know, it's why we came here. It's why we endured what we did to come here. It's so that you could be born here and you could be all American. And that's all we wanted for you. And never having fit in in Korean culture, never feeling like I belonged when I went back there to visit. I always hung on that truth. I am American. That's why it was so upsetting when ICE started to kidnap people off of the street, people who look like me, people who are just like me, who are also all American.

15:19And it was so disturbing to witness that and realize this is a threat to the identity that I hold most dear, that I know is the essential truth of me. Tell me more about kidnapping people off the street. Well, ICE is, you know, taking people who look like immigrants right out of their places of work, right out of their cars when they're waiting to pick up their children at school. They're taking them out of the Hyundai factory as they're advising people on how to do their jobs. You know, we're taking trained people who have emigrated specifically to educate Americans on electric cars and they're being incarcerated, made to drink water off the floor.

16:07You know, and these are people who deserve to be here. They're legal immigrants. So when I see that, it's really scary to me because I'm like, well, what does then all American mean at all? Yeah.

16:21Before we get back to the sitcom, I'd like to talk a little bit about that notion of being American, but also being made to feel other at school. So I mentioned briefly in the introduction that you were bullied at school and that you wanted to be as white as the American actress Lori Loughlin. Yes. I mean, poor thing. Talk about how to fail. I know. What an awful experience she went through. Yes. But what was that experience like for you at school? Do you think you still carry that pain? Yes, definitely. You carry the otherness with you as a kind of, it's residual suffering that's still there.

17:02And it existed out of, you know, kind of being raised by television and never seeing a reflection of yourself on TV. so then there's always a feeling of not belonging like there's always a feeling like i'm i wasn't meant to be here even if it's subtle even if it's unconscious you know you go around the world feeling invisible so you know for me it was like learning to do comedy and learning to tell my story was a process of when um you claude reigns in the movie the invisible man he actually to see himself he wraps bandages around himself so that he can be seen so that was sort of me like learning to develop a comedy act so that I can learn how to be seen because I'd never seen anybody like me doing what I was doing so I had to literally create the possibility of it in my mind and you know that that's what it is like wrapping something around my invisible form to take shape what a metaphor is it true that your school bullies turned up once in the front row yes Yes, it happened a few times and they bought like special meet and greet tickets.

18:11And it's happened over the years. I've had quite a few bullies and I've had quite a few experiences or people who reach out on social media and want to say hi. And do you remember me? And I never answer. I always say, no, I'm so sorry. I don't want to acknowledge them, even though they've lived in my memories in a horrifying way. I also don't want to validate that. well they made you feel invisible so you're giving them invisibility back in a way right totally so it's it's kind of a fair exchange yeah but it's also funny let's go back to all american girl so you make the sitcom it airs what happens well it was really not very well received by uh critics also i i got a lot of criticism for being too fat which was not something that i had really thought about even.

19:05I mean, I had always been fat, like I just was. And I kind of accepted that. But being a comedian, I thought it didn't matter. You know, you could just sort of be fat and it wouldn't make a difference. And I was shocked to realize suddenly it did make a difference and that I had to lose a lot of weight. And so I became very focused on that. And I started taking Fen-Fen, which was like a 90s diet drug that was like a speed and a downer at the same time. So It was like, it's outlawed now because it killed people. But I loved it. I lost a lot of weight really quickly, but I became totally focused on losing weight.

19:46That became my goal rather than writing, rather than working on helping the writers. I actually wasn't even allowed in the writer's room. So it was more like I couldn't write on the show, but I could help them or try to guide them. but we also were in such different genres because I'm a stand-up comedian and they were trying to write family sitcom comedy so it was really difficult was it the studio who was making you lose the weight I think it was a combination of the you know comments that had been made in the press also the tabloids which were making up stories and writing up like articles about the chow-like chow diet, which they had like an Asian-themed diet that I had gone on supposedly to lose weight because it was imperative.

20:39And it had like lots of rice. But it was very, yeah, it was very distressing. You know, I didn't realize that my fat was going to be such a huge problem and i imagine there's another layer as well which is that you are playing yourself yeah it's a sitcom based on your experiences but you're being told that you don't look right to play yourself right that's that's that's a huge like mindfuck like you can't like i don't even know what even what to even say about that you know like you're too fat to be you um but then the the show is canceled and replaced by drew carey because he's so thin But he actually is very much allowed to be himself because he's a man and comedian.

21:28And I feel like I have a lot in common with him, you know, in terms of just like, well, why couldn't this be a sitcom star? I belong there just as much. Looking back on the 90s and that experience, I listened to the podcast interview you did with Monica Lewinsky. And I thought it was so fascinating, these two women, two powerful women with these incredibly toxic experiences of body image in the 90s and how you have overcome that decade. How do you feel about your body now? And how do you feel about the culture as it was then? Well, the culture as it was then was incredibly toxic. You couldn't even live as a woman, as any kind of woman.

22:14I mean, it was just so restrictive. The way the beauty standard was, I mean, it wasn't just like about being white. It was about being so thin, not even a healthy kind of thin. It was like you were encouraged to be just something that wasn't possible. and didn't feel good when you got there. I did get there a couple of times using drugs and starvation, and it didn't feel good. But yeah, Monica is incredible. I think she's undergone far more than I could even imagine. Still, even now, she has to go through it again now, especially with Donald Trump sucking Bill Clinton's dick. You have a whole resurgence of bullying towards Monica, which is unfortunate because she um it shows the misogyny in society but also it's allowed me to witness her strength which um is empowering to see it's her resilience that is magnificent she is amazing she's been on how to fail before and she taught me this thing that has changed how i think about life that you can feel regret for something and it still be the right choice yeah but you your weight loss was so extreme that you went into kidney failure is that right yeah it was really awful and it was really damaging and I still have some residual effects from it now you know more than 30 years on you can really damage your body with starvation anorexia it's that's what it is it's anorexia you can really damage your body I didn't understand that my fear now having also lived through the 90s albeit luckily not in the public eye so I take my hat off to people like you who managed to survive it.

23:57We are all increasingly being taught to look like each other as women who are under constant scrutiny, whether it's through early facelifts or lots of injectables. We are now being encouraged to make ourselves thin again through the ready availability of weight loss jabs. And we all sound like each other because we're using chat GPT to write stuff. And it feels like the power in being human is in imperfection. It's in our flaws. That's our uniqueness. And I feel like there's some conspiracy afoot to make us all powerless, ensuring that we lose that uniqueness. And we all just become this amoebic mass of sameness.

24:40And I think you stand in direct opposition to all of that. And I'm so grateful that you exist. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That's wonderful. But I think you're right. I think there is a kind of a homogenization of women. They want us to sort of all be the same so we can be easily controlled. Exactly. Because they've already taken away our bodily autonomy, you know, with, you know, the overturn of Roe v. Wade. So now if we could be somehow, you know, homogenized where we sort of level all of our, you know, intense desires and wants and individuality, then it's easier to also market to that kind of person.

25:19You know, it's all in a way to, you know, keep these billionaires pockets lined. Yes. And the more we shrink ourselves, spoiler alert, the less physically powerful we become, as this failure evidence is. Of course. So just to draw this particular episode of your life to a close, did the sitcom get cancelled? Yes. And are you, in a way, grateful for that? Well, I think that what would have happened is if it had been a success, I probably would have fizzled out. Maybe I would have made a couple of movies at the end of the 90s, and then I would probably be living in Santa Barbara on a huge estate at this point.

25:58I might make a cookbook or so once a decade and I would not have continued with my career as a comedian, I don't think. I don't think I would have done all the activism that I would have done. I would have led a different life, maybe one that would be perceived as metrically, the metrics of it would be more successful, but I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it as much. Fascinating answer. Yes, it probably wouldn't have been as fulfilling. Right. And you've used this anger as a kind of fuel that has paved the way for future generations. Yes. And, you know, I know Bo and Yang, Ali, Wong, they all pay tribute to you as they rightly should.

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28:49Go to shopify.co.uk slash fail. Hear your first this new year with Shopify by your side. Your second failure, there's now a tone shift, is shitting your pants on stage. Right. So, well, this is direct result of FunFun. So I was taking a combination of after even after the television show was canceled. I still thought it's because my weight, you know, it's because my weight and I've got to figure out how to get down. And then they, you know, had out loud Benven because it was killing people. And then so I had to find another drug because I can't possibly do it with diet and exercise. That's too hard.

29:32That sort of mentality was, you know, in my head totally. So I started taking all these weird drugs. There was also foods that would move food through your body quickly, like Olestra or Oline, these somehow like weird chemically produced fats that they could fry potatoes in that didn't leave any caloric dead. So you had like just the potato. Like it was a very, it's a very weird thing, but they would like, it's all these sweeteners that would make you just have diarrhea constantly. Like I, so I just started eating only that and then taking these drugs that would remove the fat from the food that you ate.

30:15Because we thought, I think in the late nineties and early two thousands, fat was a problem. I think like the weight also anorexic and diet culture, this happened in the early two thousands. So anorexic and diet culture worsened during Y2K. There was something about it. I don't know if it was the emergence of juicy track suits. I don't want to blame that item of clothing, but I think it's like that mindset of girls with little chihuahuas and big bags and tiny bodies. Yes. Low slung jeans, very, very low cut jeans that somehow brought out a beast. you know I don't want to blame people but you know like Victoria Beckham and you know sort of the icons of the era whether that's Paris Hilton or whoever you know they put forth a pretty impossible ideal I mean they probably naturally that thin but you know I think a lot of people trying to get there I was trying to get there and I was not so I was taking all these weird drugs that would just make you shit and also I wore a lot of white and there was one time I was wearing all white at a show and i was killing i was doing really well and i was almost at the end and i i started to shit out i i and it was i couldn't control it it was starting to come out it was like because it was all oil it was just grease because it was fat you remove the fat from your your food you all all it comes out is this and it looked like pepperoni grease that you blot on top of a pizza.

31:48This is orange. I think the pills that you took were orange. So it would sort of dye the oil, fat, and cling to it and push it out of your body. So it started to stain. I know it was staining the back of my dress. I was wearing a dress and pants combination. Obviously, Y2K. Classic combination. Very Y2K. It was also white. It was kind of, I don't know, maybe it wasn't goop because that wasn't around yet, but it probably would have been an outfit Gwyneth Paltrow would have approved of. kind of goop ready outfit. And yeah, I just started spurting orange grease out of my asshole while I'm on stage.