Margaret Cho & Whit Stillman

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2016

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Margaret Cho sits down with Jesse to talk about beginning her career during the 90s comedy boom in San Francisco, growing up in a Korean immigrant family, and how the community around her family's gay bookstore continues to touch and inspire her life. Margaret Cho's new album American Myth is now available on iTunes and on her website, MargaretCho.com. She's also out on tour this May and June. Later, Whit Stillman joins Jesse to talk about his love for Jane Austen, the importance of language in his films and how the comedy of Will Ferrell infiltrated his new period piece. Whit Stillman's new film Love and Friendship is in theaters this week. A Criterion collection of his first three films (Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco) are now available in special box set edition. For his Outshot, Jesse sings the praises of a basketball scrapper who may not get all the fame, but is no less deserving of the glory – Draymond Green.

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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.
0:12.6	It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Can you imagine being regularly introduced at work by
0:18.6	your gender? Like before someone even gives your name? Margaret Cho used to experience
0:25.0	that on a nightly basis. And comedy audiences didn't hold back about how they felt.
0:30.7	No, ladies and gentlemen, we have a woman. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
0:37.7	worst. It's weird how that sort of misogyny that was sort of existed there. I don't know
0:44.1	where they got it from because women comedians are so funny. Like that's never been an issue
0:48.3	with women comics. Like I never ever thought women were any less powerful than a male
0:54.2	comic, but they just had this assumption. But then women have to be so much better anyway
0:58.9	to serve last in comedy. We have to really excel to go anywhere. It's Bullseye.
1:12.3	I'll talk with Margaret Cho about growing up in San Francisco under the care and tutelage
1:17.0	of gay men. The Castro scene in the 80s made her feel more comfortable discovering her
1:21.6	own identity. The culture that was them just coming from all these small towns and going
1:27.0	to San Francisco in New York and suddenly being allowed to be themselves not only as a great
1:32.1	to be gay, it's phenomenal. We'll also talk about the unusual level of responsibility
1:37.8	Cho has felt over her life. First, as an in-house translator for her parents later as an Asian-American
1:44.6	trailblazer in entertainment. Plus, I'll sit down with the writer and director Whit Stillman.
1:50.1	There's new movie Love and Friendship. It's adapted from Jane Austen. But you might
1:54.6	notice a little bit of a fret pack vibe in there. It's a kind of comedy that I would have
1:59.8	loved to have gotten into, but no one's going to offer me a wheelchair or film. But I can
2:05.0	write some of that kind of comedy and put it into my films. And I'll tell you about the
2:09.8	value of being an in-betweener. That's all coming up on Bullseye. Let's go.
	...

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