Things Margaret Cho learned in her first year as a big-shot TV star:
– You get recognized a lot.
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“I actually had a bunch of people chase me down the street a couple of hours ago,” Cho, star of ABC’s “All-American Girl,” said during a phone call from her home in Los Angeles. “I had to get in my car pretty fast to make a pretty quick getaway. Which is really hard because I have these blisters on my feet.”
The 26-year-old San Francisco native realizes that “television is such a powerful medium, and they say more people watch television in one night than have ever seen the Mona Lisa. It’s like you’re working for a mass audience.”
– It was hard, but not hard, being the first Korean-American to star in a network TV show.
The reason it was hard for Cho, but not hard at all, is because she doesn’t have a frame of reference to be anything else except a Korean-American.
“I don’t know what it would be like to be anybody else than who I am,” says Cho, a standup comic for eight years. “So if that in itself is a burden, I’m not sure, maybe it is.
“It’s ostensibly asking would you feel differently towards all of this if you were white? Would you get off easier if you were a white person? Basically that’s sort of what the question to me has come to mean.”
– You have to let things roll off your back.
The world of television is such a wacky existence, with having your face seen by millions of people, network execs always wanting a say, critics either ripping you or loving you, and all the other stuff that’s involved.
Cho is learning to “try to approach life in a sense with sort of detachment. It’s very difficult in a lot of ways to deal with being in kind of a public arena . . . it’s kind of weird. So I guess it’s just not to take things too seriously, which I tend to do.”
Cho, who says ABC has been so supportive of her that she thinks “All-American Girl” will return in the fall, is touring the country working on material for a cable comedy special and an album. She’s landing at a Chicago comedy club for the first time, after working such haunts as the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
She’ll appear at the Chicago Improv for one night only, Friday, for two shows. The Improv is at 504 N. Wells St. Call 312-STANDUP.
Now give us Money
Jeff Altman knows what it’s like to work fundraisers. His plan is to do the jokes, and then thank the folks.
“You try to get everybody together and you just do your act,” says Altman, a comic since the mid-1970s. “You just do the things that are going to make people laugh, and at the end of your act, you’ll say it’s a great cause, thanks for coming out.”
He thinks the key to making the benefit successful is to kill. That way, people will want to support it again the following year. “People will remember it as a worthwhile event.”
Altman, 40, has worked for the United Way and CARE, calling them “near and dear to my heart.” He’s going to be in Chicago headlining the Funny Money event, which raises money for child abuse prevention, and which has also become something of an institution.
Altman ticks off a list of programs that are done by Child Abuse Prevention Services of Chicago, which benefits from the event. The organization runs a parental stress hot line, home visitation for children at risk, parent support groups and other services. “It’s a pretty effective group. It’s a good thing to support, so they asked me to come in and do it, and I was happy to do it.”
Altman was happy to help because of Funny Money’s theme: “It shouldn’t hurt to be a child.”
“I just think the most important thing in the world are children,” he says.
Funny Money, the baby of Chicago comics Harry Teinowitz and Spike Manton of sports radio station WMVP-AM (1000), is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a bash on Friday. As usual, its home is the Park West Theatre, 322 W. Armitage Ave., starting at 6:30 p.m. Call 312-427-1611, or Ticketmaster at 312-559-1212, for more information.
Last yuks
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The always-funny Richard Jeni, who has his own show, “Platypus Man,” on UPN on Mondays (8:30 p.m. on WPWR-Ch. 50), is making a rare comedy club appearance at Zanies in Vernon Hills on Saturday. Call 708-549-6030.