Guess what, Mom

Comedian Margaret Cho scrunches her rubber face into a full moon of disapproval as she mimics her mother’s broken English in the filmed version of her November 1999 performance at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater. “You gay? Gays all over the world (pause), but not in Korea.” This is but one of the answering-machine messages Cho milks for laughs in I’m the One That I Want, a 96-minute confessional film that covers such topics as gay bars, straight pornography, lesbian sex, the Ku Klux Klan, alcoholism and the ugly side of Hollywood.

Cho shrilly repeats the query and decides she is neither gay nor straight—"I’m just slutty.” “Aren’t your Korean parents ashamed of you?” she has been asked. “I can feel their silent disapproval from miles away,” she responds. So it goes in I’m the One That I Want, an alternately raunchy, heartfelt, captivating and rather disposable spin on life by a woman who mixes modern taboos with stories of personal crisis and pain.

Cho, 31, is a sort of Korean-American Roseanne with an X-rated edge and a shotgun agenda. She slings the word “faggot” the way Richard Pryor used to sling the word “nigger” and is much more provocative and profound when addressing race issues rather than explicit sexual references. She is not as dangerous, urgent nor hysterically funny as Pryor, as warm as Julia Sweeney (God Said “Ha!”), as cerebral as Spalding Gray or as manic as Sandra Bernhard. She is just as crude as Eddie Murphy. She is also a self-described “heterophobic” who has an exasperating story to share.

The heart of I’m the One That I Want is Cho’s oral walk through her aborted transformation in the mid-1990s from national comic celebrity to star of the first TV sitcom that features an Asian-American family. Cho’s standup material was to be packaged into All-American Girl, a series about a rebellious Korean girl surviving in a conservative household.

Network television was able to shoehorn the routines of Tim Allen and Jerry Seinfeld into successful shows, but ABC waffled on Cho’s fit into prime time America. They hired a trainer and a nutritionist to physically groom her. After Cho lost 30 pounds in two weeks to play herself, her kidneys collapsed. The network hired a consultant to make the show more Asian. Then the show was deemed to be “too Asian.” By the time the series was canceled, Cho was stripped of her dignity, criticized by elements of the Korean community and addicted to diet pills. She was replaced by Drew Carey and regurgitated back into the world, where she wallowed in booze and promiscuity.

Some of Cho’s material gets bogged down in dry insight and repeated punch lines (even a line such as “Hi, I’m Gwen. I’m here to wash your vagina” has a statute of limitations before it loses its punch). Other material, such as the secret to a time-efficient blow job, is played for its grossness, and several situations, such as her having sex with another woman while working aboard a cruise ship ("a lesbian Loveboat") are just not as amusing as intended.

Fans get a full dose of their lewd, comic hostess, but there’s not a single reaction shot of the audience. Under director Lionel Coleman, the four cameras used to shoot two separate, edited performances never shift from Cho as she paces the stage in her pink, V-neck blouse, with long sleeves slit to her elbows, a maroon skirt that reaches to mid-shins, darker shaded pants and black, high-soled shoes. Two bottles of water sit on a lone wooden stool, and she’s armed with a cordless microphone.

If Cho has her way, her fans will get plenty of follow-up visits, too. "I feel like I’ve gotten to a great place in my life. I just want to do it for a long time—at least until the next Korean-American fag-hag, shit-starter, girl comic, trash talker comes up and takes my place." Which could take quite a while.