Margaret Cho overdraws her black account I love Margaret Cho, but I found myself cringing while watching her "Revolution" DVD today. She shifts her voice/gesture/body language rapidly between stock characters, sometimes so rapidly that for a moment you aren't sure who you are hearing. For example, in one moment she straightens her back, opens her eyes wide, and purses her lips, and she is a shocked, prim Asian woman. Or she might spread out her arms, bend her elbows up and her wrists out, extend her thumbs and her first two fingers, thrust out her chest and cock her head to one side to momentarily become a black ghetto chick with attitude.

This is where I think she runs into trouble. This particular characterization, to which she returns again and again, is what a friend of mine would call 'unearned.' Her other various poses as Asians or gays all riff on more fully realized characters she has previously introduced in the body of her work. The black ghetto chick with attitude, though, appears without context. She is just a trope, presumably available to Cho only because she has watched Jerry Springer.

I can see the allure of this role for her, because she can employ it as an inversion of a demure Asian character. But there is a problem with this. When she borrows from our cultural stereotypes to enact a demure Asian, she is simultaneously investing her own created persona back into our cultural conception of the Asian female. She enriches our concept of the Asian female. But she offers no fully realized black woman character in “Revolution,” or anywhere else in her work as far as I remember. She merely helps herself to an alter ego borrowed from black female identity, with all its history and its struggles, without making any concurrent investment back into that same black female identity.  ¶ 9:39 PM