by MICHELLE WOO
If you haven’t heard, comedic superheroine Margaret Cho has a great podcast called Monsters of Talk, where she and co-host Jim Short discuss music, comedy and life in general with all sorts of interesting folks ranging from Billy Bragg to Tegan and Sara. Her latest guests were Jenny Yang and Atsuko Okatsuka, founders of Dis/orient/ed Comedy, the first (mostly) Asian American female stand-up comedy tour, which stops in Los Angeles this Saturday.
On the show, the funny ladies chat about everything from the lack of Asian American women on the stand-up circuit to the importance of comedy in times of tragedy and sorrow, such as the aftermath of the Isla Vista killings near UC Santa Barbara. They also get real about the boxes that people have tried to force them into throughout their lives.
“As Asian American women, we’re raised to not take up a lot of space,” Cho says. “You don’t want to be too much. My mother would always say, ‘That’s too much! Too much!’ Everything is too much. That’s really the worst thing you can be. For me, I was always too fat. And then it was too loud. Or too emotional.
“But it’s weird how you’re encouraged to have a life in the arts. My family was very interested in me learning how to become a good musician, but not love it too much, not be devoted to it, not be obsessed with it. They don’t want you to become a true artist.”
There’s a lot of insight packed into the half-hour segment. Give it a listen.
