Margaret Cho on the Craziest Day of Her Entire Career

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Craziest Day of My Entire Career is a segment where we invite guests from the entertainment industry to tell us about a single day where things went wildly off the rails. Sharing their story with us this week is Margaret Cho. She's an actress, an activist, and a musician. She's had multiple Grammy and Emmy nominations for her comedy and acting, and has been touring to sold-out crowds since 1999. Her one-woman show "I'm the One That I Want" was turned into a best-selling book and feature film. But back in the early stages of her career? She had to take whatever gigs she could get. When we asked Margaret about the craziest day of her career, she took us back to the start of her standup career. The time she did three shows, in three states, in one day.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:12.3	From MaximumFun.org and NPR, it's Bullseye.
0:24.6	What's the craziest day you've ever had at work?
0:28.4	When you're in show business, a day at the office can get pretty hairy.
0:32.3	That's why we created this segment, the craziest f***ing day of my entire career.
0:37.8	And telling us about their day, Margaret Cho.
0:41.4	Margaret Cho's a lot of things.
0:43.2	Shy isn't one of them.
0:44.9	She is bold and loud and abrasive and ingratiating and revealing and shameless and delightful and hilarious.
0:53.1	She started doing stand-up in San Francisco when she was a teenager.
0:56.8	Now she's one of comedy's most recognizable names.
1:00.4	When we asked Margaret about the craziest day of her career, she took us way back when to the beginning.
1:06.9	These days, she plays theaters.
1:09.7	Back then, she took whatever gigs she could get.
1:13.3	Here's Margaret Cho.
1:14.3	Hi, I'm Margaret Cho and this is the craziest f***ing day in my career.
1:20.6	I had three gigs across three time zones in one day and it was a lot.
1:32.6	So the craziest day in my career began around five in the morning and it was outside of San Francisco
1:40.8	where I was booked to impersonate a progressive female who was infuriated
1:49.0	at a conservative male breakfast business meeting.
1:54.5	And so I was paid as kind of like, if this was punked, but it was the 80s and it was a conservative male breakfast
2:05.4	where they told a number of very racist, very homophobic, very sexist jokes,
	...

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