'Where's My Parade?':
On Asian American Diva-Nation
Rachel C. Lee
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/ps/lee.htm

[Note: This essay is excerpted from a longer article, which will
appear in TDR in 2004.]

I almost married this Irish-American guy. . .
I even went down to meet his family, and they lived in Sarasota,
Florida. . . .

Like I love his family but they were kinda too nice to me. So the
whole time I felt really like "Oh, this is my host family [starts
bowing]. I come from Asia [bows from the waist three times, slowly.]
America is numbah one [bows again]. Sank you mistah Eddy's faddah."
[bows and stays low]

If one had to pantomime Oriental deference on the Western stage, one
would be hard pressed to find a gesture better suited to this work
than the bow. A pose so iconically Asian, the bow appears only to
enhance the yellowface persona that the comedienne, Margaret Cho,
throws on with her other accessories - the affected accent, the
mincing steps, and the reference to a "host family" - all to suggest
that the domestic civility of her prospective in-laws - their being
overly "nice" - casts her own relationship to them in a global
light, one of international exchange following a particular model,
that of white-ethnic families' sponsoring Asian foreign students.

As Cho deploys it, the bow - a civil gesture - hides an aggression,
or more accurately, it makes apparent an aggression, an uneven
relation of racialized power between whites and yellows, between
races defined by distinct interpellation in relations of production
(labor) and exchange (capitalist consumption). Prior to her actual
visit to Sarasota, Cho anticipates another kind of social
interaction more transparently revelatory of the racial disjunctures
and spatial segregation operating historically between people of
color and whites in the United States: "I asked [my boyfriend], 'Are
there gonna be any Asian people there [in Sarasota]?' And he was
like, 'No.' And I said, 'Okay. . . . Could you just drop me off at
the dry cleaner then? [beat] Cause I don't want to be the only
one.'" Through such historical references, Cho pokes fun at those
who would view the bow as merely an Oriental flourish. To see Cho's
mimicry of Asian obedience as the mere staging of quaint
international differences - bowing versus hand-shaking - rather than
historical racial relations is to adopt a view that the artist would
surely call "too nice," made possible only through the repression of
historical memory, and a deliberate ignorance of prior performative
references.

As Cho bends and holds her upper half parallel to the floor, one
cannot but help see in this body position a citation to an earlier
bit on the Chippendale dancers:

The Chippendale dancers are gay. [beat] They're gay. You know why?
Because there is no such thing as a straight man with a visible
abdominal muscle. Doesn't exist. You need to suck cock [Cho bends
slowly over] to get that kind of muscle definition.

Cho speaks these last lines to the floor. Her body is engaged in a
prostration, in a (homo)erotics, in a social ritual of bowing, and
in a geopolitically inflected movement, all at once. The
repositioning of the body, or parts of the body repositioning
themselves, occurs in both a visual register (the spectacle of the
bow) and in a verbal register (the reference to traveling to
Sarasota signifies a repositioning of the body, as does the
reference to raised abdominals). I will be taking this repositioning
of the body as a starting point to inquire into how the Asian
American performer, Margaret Cho, intervenes in public space through
the stand-up comedy concert and how her theatrical and literary
seizing of public space interarticulates with the condition of
already possessing a publicized body. Through the sensate body and
its leakiness - its inadequate partitioning according to
geopolitical, gendered, or domestic(ating) principles of space - Cho
both stages her own ambiguous body and comments on the political
compulsion to disavow the erotics and slippage of the body in order
to speak publicly, rationally, and abstractly. In essence, Cho
returns this fully sensate body to the audience, rendering political
knowledge through affect, critiquing the boundaries that set apart
historical knowledge from bodily pleasure, and mocking not just the
alienation of racially and sexually marked bodies from the proper
(civilized) representational field, but also of the mechanism of
this alienation itself.

In my examination of Cho's comedy act and her memoir, both entitled
I'm the One that I Want, I take up the literal site of performance
(the bare stage) as a space of assemblages, as a platform for
revealing the body's leakage - its infirm boundaries and borders as
well as its embeddedness in histories of migration. I use migration,
here, to refer both to expulsions across national borders (for
instance, Cho's father is deported from America just three days
after his wife gives birth) as well as to the more mundane vagrancy
of stand-up performers who, with the rise of comedy chains in the
1980s, travel the national circuit as "road warriors" (Borns,
Stebbins). Relief from the life on the road prompts Cho to develop a
situation comedy for television broadcast, a comedy not only
sporting the ubiquitous living room interior (carry-over from
naturalist theater) but also incapable, ultimately, of simulating a
homespace for "alien" Asians within the white world of television.
My argument, however, is not that Cho is unable to find a home
through Hollywood development but that home, itself, has become
unsettled, revealed as a spatial arrangement whose ideality rests on
imprisonment

Theorizing Standup Comedy

Contemporary standup comedy has various chronotopic antecedents, for
instance, in the tradition of "fools, jesters, clowns and comics,
which can be traced back at least as far as the Middle Ages," to
that of popular minstrel theater in nineteenth-century America, to
that of the transatlantic lecture circuit supported by humorists
such as Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.
[1] In the early twentieth century, standup comedy was the backbone
of vaudeville, burlesque, and variety theater; and, in the post-war
period, nightclubs, resorts, coffeehouses, as well as contemporary
comedy clubs all emerged as venues for the stand-alone comic, the
sketch ensemble, and the two-person comedy team. Those who try to
account for the particular type of popularity standup comedy has
enjoyed since the mid-1960s (characterized, for instance, by the
emergence of the comedy club[2], and by the influence of comics in
four televisional genres: the comedy/variety show, the situation
comedy, the talk show, and game show) often turn to psychological
and economic explanations, noting that comedy functions as an
entertaining form of tension release, at an affordable cost.[3]
However, a political explanation for the popularity of comedy clubs
might be offered as well. The erosion of faith in a "rational"
public sphere gives rise to an alternative public forum where
observations on the politics not just of government but of everyday
life can be aired via entertainment.

Elaborating on the standup comic as contemporary anthropologist,
Stephanie Koziski credits these entertainers with making "visible to
an audience tacit areas of unacknowledged human attitudes and
behaviors, residing in private unofficial realms" (59).[4] Stand-up
comics make political knowledge evident in everyday life amusing to
ponder, and also render political aggression - expressions of desire
for power - both palpable and palatable. There is always the risk,
of course, that an audience will refuse to engage the comic's
aggression disguised as humor. The most notable manifestation of
this refusal is dead silence - an indication that the audience has
not been moved. Comics typically respond to such lack of engagement
by making a joke of the audience's refusal to laugh (basically, a
pity joke where the comic cajoles the audience into laughing at
their lack of laughter). However, the point to be registered, here,
is not that the affectual public sphere ceases to exist if the
comedien(ne) fails to engage the audience - they don't laugh, or
laugh at parts not intended to be funny - but that an alternative
forum of collective political knowledge emerges through this medium
of pathos and sensation (the body shaking with laughter) that
challenges classical notions of propriety and dignity, as well as
(modern notions of) rationality as preconditions for a proper
(communicative) public sphere. This channeling of the public sphere
through entertainment suggests a notion of public dialogue being
more forceful (effectual) when it is affectual as well. In other
words, it's not that the notion of a rational public sphere ceases
to exist, but that the tenability of this rational public sphere -
resting on a notion of abstract citizenship, or requiring
abstraction as precondition of voice - has been called into question.
[5] Moreover, just as the "rational" public sphere does not cease to
exist because there are those who cannot participate in it (e.g.,
the mentally infirm), the affectual public sphere, similarly, does
not evaporate because there are those who refuse to be shaken.
However, more and more, the rational public sphere is revealed as a
phantasm; standup comedy as both commentator on and alternative to
that rational public sphere underscores the phantasmatic qualities
of the rational public sphere itself.

In his theory of standup comedy, John Limon casts a more formalist
light on how this popular entertainment functions: "What is stood up
in stand-up comedy is abjection. Stand-up makes vertical (or
ventral) what should be horizontal (or dorsal)" (4). His thesis
turns on a double meaning of abjection, as well as a double meaning
of "standup":

By abjection . . . I mean [first] . . . what everybody means:
abasement, groveling prostration. Second, I mean by it what Julia
Kristeva means: a psychic worrying of those aspects of oneself that
one cannot be rid of, that seem, but are not quite, alienable Ñ for
example, blood, urine, feces, nails, and the corpse. The 'abject,'
in Kristeva's term of art, indicates what cannot be subject or
object to you. . . .

To 'stand-up' abjection is simultaneously to erect it and miss one's
date with it: comedy is a way of avowing and disavowing abjection,
as fetishism is a way of avowing and disavowing castration.
Fetishism is a way of standing up the inevitability of loss; stand-
up is a way of standing up the inevitability of return. (4-5)

To clarify the geometry that Limon offers, standup comedy both makes
erect what is abased and, by doing so, staves off a kind of boundary-
or category- crisis between subject and object, embodied in the
liminal category of the "abject" that threatens always to return, to
undo the alienation one intends for it. The erection of the abased
is, in a sense, a spatial tactic of verticality that allows one
(through its geometric distractions) to miss one's (temporal) date
with blood, urine, feces, nails, and the corpse, precisely the
elements much of standup performance employs to comic effect. I
would note that vertical axis is often overlooked in spatial
analysis. This vertical movement is, in fact, not only how standup
operates but a principal of architecture that Cho maps as the
bourgeois home.

The Parlor, the Airplane, and the Prison

In her memoir, Cho portrays the writer of her short-lived television
show, All-American Girl, as a "really nice . . . man" who
nevertheless fails to transform her stand-up routine into an
amusing, family sitcom:

Gary . . . cranked out a pilot from five minutes of my standup, a
sunny expose on what it was like to grow up a rebellious daughter in
a conservative Korean household. I spared him the real story. The
truth was that I lived in my parents' basement when I was twenty
because my father couldn't stand the sight of me, and therefore
banned me from the rest of the house. . . . I was unemployed and
trying to kick a sick crystal meth habit by smoking huge bags of
paraquat-laced marijuana and watching Nick at Night for six hours at
a time. Now that's a sitcom. (105)

Though it is unclear whether the Chos' house in San Francisco is a
Victorian by builder's design, certainly its segregation of spaces
establishes its resemblance to the Victorian household publicized in
fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, a "partitioned and
hierarchical space," whose governing principle of division is
designed to contain aberrant desires in prison-like spaces - e.g.,
the basement (Armstrong 185).[6] The efficiency of the well-ordered
household turns gothic, with the parlor in fact requiring the prison.

Interestingly, these vertical levels of the Victorian household do
not appear as the earliest memories the comedienne holds toward
something called "home." In the opening pages of her memoir, Cho
offers a portrait of exile, that while seemingly the antithesis of
home, actually constitutes one of the poles of home as Una Chaudhuri
construes it.[7]

My parents had a talent for leaving me places when I was very young.
This had to do with immigration difficulties. . . . My father didn't
know how to break it to my mother that he was to be deported three
days after I was born, so he conveniently avoided the subject. . . .

In my parents' colorfully woven mythology, that was the one corner
of the tapestry they carefully concealed. Knowing I probably
wouldn't remember, they kept it to themselves. But I did remember,
perhaps not actual events but colors and shapes and feelings. The
insides of planes, the smell of fuel, unfamiliar arms, crying and
crying. (2)

One doesn't normally construe the airplane as a home space. Cho,
nevertheless, brings our attention to her primary attachments formed
through this confusing space, experienced as a series of
sensations, "the insides of planes, the smell of fuel, unfamiliar
arms, crying and crying" (2). These objects outside of mother and
father, as well as spaces outside of both the parlor and the cellar,
populate the landscape of home - defined now as vehicle of transit.
[8]

Cold War politics as much as the intervention of the Law of the
Father, then, leads to the young Margaret's sense of maternal theft.
If the Cold War hysteria to protect the nation's boundaries (and
ideological integrity) is at least partly responsible for the sense
of fragility the young Margaret feels in her relation to her primal
(erotic) attachments, it also leads to a kind of promiscuous,
excessive, and indiscriminate attachment: "in the spirit of my
birthplace, I learned that if I couldn't be with the one I loved, I
would love the one I was with. I was one [year old], and already
somewhat of a slut. I loved lots of stewardesses, and lots of old
people" (2). In short, this airplane space - that space which
carries one across borders and territories - forms a shadow home to
that other site of the Victorian household, each radically distinct
with respect to their partitions and segregated spaces.

In the live performance, Cho expressly refers to the vertical space
of the household in order to mock her own family's distance from the
ideal subjects of the situation comedy. The episode occurs in both
the text and in the live performance. In comparison, the written
memory of "jet fuel," "crying and crying," and "lov[ing] the one I
was with" does not appear in the stage-act. Arguably, however, the
lack of a literal transcription of these latter events in the live
concert underestimates the gestural and affective translation of
them. The promiscuous attachments of the sort spurred on by the
deportation episode color the rest of the stand-up act and are amply
staged in gesture and movement. Cho doesn't verbally refer to the
material on her being sent to Korea at the age of one; and yet, the
staging of her "slutty" desires, her proliferating erotic objects,
might be construed as the trace of historical memory. The
comedienne, therefore, imports her ambulatory sensibility to the
stage in an indirect fashion, in order to negotiate between the
medium of denotative language and that of bodily pantomime.

Cho uses the stage, the theatrical space, to hold forth on her own
monstrous body, a body whose leakiness[9] (inadequate partitioning)
is made monstrous by bourgeois codes of respectability and
segregation (that view combination as a horror) and relegate such a
body to the basement. What this re-segregation of the body tries to
do is quite literal: it sends the abased body downward, lowering it.
But while the household spatially forges those subjects and body
parts nominated as abased or abjected, standup reverses the spatial
relation. "Stand-up makes vertical (or ventral) what should be
horizontal (or dorsal)" (Limon 4) or, to use the metaphors provided
by Cho's text, the basement takes up the space of the aerial, the
airplane.

Staging Another Stage

"I'm the One that I Want," the live concert at the Warfield Theater,
begins with Margaret Cho running out onto the stage to thunderous
applause, sustained through her waving at the crowd, taking a deep
bow, and thanking San Francisco for such a profuse welcome. She
shouts, "It's so good to be home!" Cho, no doubt, refers to San
Francisco, but one might also take the stage, itself, to be
her "home." Tellingly, that stage is bare, but for a stool and
water. The puns here are deliberate, for no convention mandates the
reading of the stage scenery realistically; one can interpret them
symbolically and punningly, a kind of set joke. Stool and water,
then, are framed by deep red, velvet curtains in the background, and
another, more down-stage set of gold mesh-like curtains tied back as
lavish window-dressing for the performance space, a performance
space that has been set with objects collectively signaling the
abject. During the act, Cho never sits on the stool; she uses it as
a small table for her water. The only other prop in the act - if it
can be called that - is the wireless microphone that Cho wields as
she bounces and struts across the stage.

After bowing and thanking the audience for coming, Cho begins her
act by talking about another performance on her tour, a benefit for
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), where fashion
designer, Karl Lagerfeld, is being protested for including fur in
his last show:

I love Karl Lagerfeld and they hate him. . . . They protested his
last show. People were chanting, "Karl Lagerfeld is a murderer! Karl
Lagerfeld is a murderer!" And I thought, wouldn't it be fabulous if
Karl Lagerfeld actually was a murderer? Like what if he just fucking
lost it one day, backstage at his show in Milan, and bludgeoned Elsa
Klensch to death with a platform shoe. "I hate that blouse!" He
would have to go to jail, and they would make him wear the orange
jumpsuit. I would call Amnesty International myself if that happened.

The performance, in short, begins with the staging of another stage,
more specifically the street spectacle outside the couture show. The
PETA organizers' outrage at the fashion designer's encouraging
slaughter for fashion becomes a true "crime of fashion" (that orange
jumpsuit!) - in essence, turning outrage into camp. Here, and
throughout her written memoir, Cho tells stories about the spillage
of theater into spaces outside of itself, taking place in rituals of
antagonism (Turner) and even in disciplinary spaces through which
the knowledge-power nexus of the state exercises its capillary power
(Foucault).

For instance, as the routine progresses, Cho imagines, via the
fashionista's presence in jail, the prison itself as theater space.

[The jailers] would take away his fan. He would be on the pay phone
to André Leon Talley, "André, could you send me a fan? Could you
bake it in a cake? Or stick it up your ass or zomething? I need a
fan, right away." He has to make one out of spoons. [Cho purses her
lips and fans herself frenetically]

The comedic force, here, emerges from staging the absurd
incongruities between the limitations of prison life and the
extravagances of the fashion world (having to design a fan out of
spoons!). Outright, she performs, in absurd fashion, the
consequences of Karl Lagerfeld's criminalization by PETA - he might
end up in jail, due to using beaver-skin trim in his next line. But
implied, as well, is another unspoken, but historically more likely,
criminalization of the designer, not due to his use of fur, but
because - as Cho states unapologetically - "Karl Lagerfeld is such a
faggot." By putting Karl Lagerfeld ludicrously in jail (in the
basement/prison), Cho dramatizes what happens legally through anti-
sodomy laws. She makes the law ludicrous for its criminalizing of a
minority identity, that of the homosexual. Moreover, her "faggot" in
jail foreshadows her own imprisonment in the family's basement, with
Cho making explicit the cross-identifications between herself and
the profanity, "fag." She mimics him, "I am fanning the flames of my
faggotry," but then qualifies her terminology, "I love the word
faggot, because it describes my kind of guy. I [beat] am a fag hag.
Fag hags [beat] are the backbone of the gay community." Her prison
schtick establishes another claim of interdependence: fag and fag
hags are the backbone of the straight community. Their abasement,
the punishment and sequestering of these subjectivities, elevates
heternormativity to the parlor.

Cho's talent is to theatricalize or see the performative and
spectatorial exchanges in everyday life, but especially in mass
settings of consumption and leisure (e.g., the Haagen-Daaz ice cream
parlor where two of her drag-queen friends stage guerilla theater,
and Korean Methodist Youth Camp where a psychological and physical
wrestling match between Margaret and the rest of the campers
ensues). In her book as well as in her subsequent live concert, "The
Notorious C.H.O," the comedienne tells of actual theater spaces -
theaters of cruelty (e.g., an S & M performance in New York) where
actors surround the audience, making them the live bait of their
sadistic acts (77-80). As these experiments in environmental theater
become more life-like (defying the set boundaries between performers
and spectators, occupying quotidian settings), so does life resemble
theater, or perhaps the stage of the stand-up performance becomes a
way to redirect the everyday theaters of cruelty (e.g., Youth Camp)
and to retard collision with their degrading force, by
simultaneously erecting and missing them.

Cho performs this simulatenous erecting and missing of degradation
in her own rumination over her sexual identity and, more
significantly, the leakiness of the categories gay and straight. Cho
stages her own liminal position between sexual identity
categories: "Am I gay? Am I straight? I'm just slutty. [beat]
Where's my parade?" These lines query not only how we might make the
space of Asian American queer citizenship, but in what registers and
styles - through what performative rituals, carnivalesque
spectacles, and collective walks through town - will the full
citizenship of a "Korean American, fag hag, shit starter, girl
comic, trash talker" be entertained?

Cho's book and performance, in short, point us not to a telos to her
temporal narrative (the sex act/social act [lesbian intercourse or
the wedding] that will decide her identity once and for all) but to
spaces of social process that reveal identificatory categories of
the body as leaky. She directs our attention to the gay life of Polk
Street (in San Francisco) that doubles as a site for staging
guerilla theater; the performative space of drag queen wrestling
contests and the (similarly agonistic) space of Korean (Christian
youth) "camp;" the travelogue of seedy hotels marking the
entertainer's touring schedule, and the taxidermic (ethnographic,
exotic and decidedly, non-contemporary) set of Hollywood's first
Asian American family sit-com; and finally, the spaces of bodily
excess and breakdown: the hospital, the gym, the wet bed, the death
bed - all sites Cho recalls in her comedy act. Through these various
spaces, Cho constructs bodily excess as a kind of spatial allegory
for the contact zones between First World and Third World, between
normative versus abject citizenship and sexuality, and between the
modern subject of history (whom Cho constructs as both boring and
salvific) and a primitive, promiscuous yet also rejected savage who
wavers between being locked in an uncivilized past and being the
best survivor in a postmodern jungle of guerilla performances. In
other words, Cho is not showing the primitive as the subject and
space who must give way to the future (i.e., the postmodern, urbane
subject who can make it in America); rather, the force of her art
emerges from this confusion of times and spaces, and ultimately the
throwing into question of both the U.S.'s mythic separateness from
primitive time and space, and of the nation as an adequate
containment of such diva-spaces - of high drama and excess, and of
the abject stood up.

Conclusion

The theater of the body that Cho's live show campily stages also
ghosts the abstract public sphere and its modes of ratiocination and
political rectitude. For Cho, the abstract public sphere is best
staged or apprehended not in the courtroom, nor in the halls of
government, nor in the refinement of (both political and artistic)
representation, but on the snowy white mountaintop of a ski slope,
where a certain positioning of the body is itself abjected:

I was skiing in Deer Valley and there's no people of color up there,
and I'm up there, skiing, trying to fit in like an asshole, and I
have an instructor and he goes [lowers her voice an octave] "Heyyy,
don't take this the wrong way, but you have a tendency to booowww
[her mouth opens hugely, her lips contorting over the word] into
your skis."

Notably, Cho does not bow in this routine. Aside from one exception,
she delivers this anecdote verbally not bodily, even as this vocal
reference to the bow conjures up the many bodily postures she has
inhabited throughout the performance. Here, the bow is both
glaringly absent and present. But what's the nature of
the "something racial," here?

For a brief moment on that mountain top, the Asian American
performer appears to be enjoying the liberal promise of an abstract
body (even though in the retrospective telling of the story, the
absence of people of color in Deer Valley is upfront, hence, there
is never really an abstract body for Cho on the hill). The bit seems
to be offered as a critique of the way in which the recognition of
race prevents Cho's entitlement to an unconscious and shared
investment in whiteness. However, it is important to note that the
ski instructor doesn't merely mark Cho by telling her that she bows,
but marks the white space of the mountain top as segregated, as a
space sealed off from minorities' - but not white persons' -
discourse on race (the raising of/seeing of race, the practice of
using race as informal or formal selection). Only Cho's pedgagogy of
the oppressed, her sensitization to historical relations of racial
uneveness, is not allowed, or is framed as the noise in this
communicative exchange between the white instructor and colored
(exchange) student. In order to ski down and among snowy white
surfaces, then, Cho will have to partition this knowledge - this
racial education/testimony (diva citizenship) - off; she will have
to laugh/smile more universally.

Still dramatizing the scene on the mountain top, Cho switches to an
unhumorous face, brow furrowed, face pulled in close to the chin,
lips pressed together firmly - holds this face, reminiscent of the
one she mugs while impersonating her mother, and says, "Fuck you."
Loud applause and whistles come from the audience. The tag line is
delivered, "And then I fell," as Cho lifts one leg and arm up,
gesturing her fall backward onto the powder.

Prone (flat on her back, rather than a bent/bowed forward) on that
snowy white hill is where Cho leaves her body in this routine. This
is the same position of Cho's body in the hospital with Gwen
hovering to "waaarsh" her vagina. In the contest of funny, Cho wins
not by bowing more deeply, but by talking back in ire, and risking
that subsequent ignoble position of specular (di)splay. This act of
heroic pedagogy enacted by Cho operates through the juxtaposition of
moral outrage (racial justice), and slippage into camp, with Cho
showing us not that only angry, testimonial pedgagogy deserves our
wonder but that in the camp of funny (in an anger that falls, but
reveals historical and political knowledge in that splayed pratfall)
there are many lessons to mine.[Return to text]

Endnotes

1. See Mintz, Bushman, Watkins, and Stebbins. Another antecedent,
suggested by one critic, are the prologues to the Greek dramas,
which though not traditionally in the mode of jest, anticipate the
standup comedian's role as an entertainer who "speaks to and for the
common people" (Stebbins 6). [Return to text]

2. Phil Berger describes the comedy chain's emergence in a
restaurant in suburban New Jersey, after a promoter, Jerry Stanley,
approached the restaurant's owner with the idea of booking a
comedian in the restaurant's entertainment room (Stebbins 12).
These "restaurants that had separate rooms for entertainment"
evolved into the comedy rooms that flourished in the 1980s; "In 1980
there were ten such places in the United States. By 1987, they
numbered somewhere between 250 and 300" (qtd. in Stebbins, 13).
Betsy Borns gives an alternative account of "the road's"
origins: "until about 1978, the road, as we know it today, didn't
exist. In that year, a comic named Ron Richards began booking
comedians from Manhattan's showcase clubs into several Ground Round
restaurants in New Jersey. Six months later, he helped out an ex-
comedian friend, Jerry Stanley, to set up similar shows in other New
Jersey restaurants. By 1979, Ron Richards was out of the business,
and Jerry Stanley was getting very rich very fast" (Borns 57).
[Return to text]

3. Robert Stebbins discounts the explanation of tension release as
not rigorous enough for "life has been as tense, if not more so, at
other periods in recent history" (16), and concludes that "comedy as
affordable entertainment is a more plausible explanation," arguing
that comedy clubs "filled the gap left by a decline in public taste
for discotheques and rock bars" (16). Less concerned with the social
history of contemporary standup comedy, Lawrence Mintz
frames "modern American standup" as providing some of our "most
vauable" social and cultural analysis (77). Following Stephanie
Koziski, Mintz nominates the standup comedian as "contemporary
anthropologist" (75). See also Kozinski. [Return to text]

4. While predominantly blurring the line between anthropologist and
standup comedian, Kozinski does underscore this remaining
distinction, "the anthropologist is - by training - a sympathetic
outsider, while the comedian is, in most cases - by temperament - a
cynical insider. [Most anthropologists] hold hope for the
possibilities available to human society, in contrast to standup
comedians who are informed by anger and despair at the inherent
weak, stupid and evil tendencies in human nature. The comedian's
pessimism goads him or her into looking for society's flaws and
broadcasting those revelations through a special kind of enacted
social drama to a select public" (63). Though somewhat overstated,
Koziski's comments have suggestive implications both for thinking
Western anthropologies of other (usually dubbed more "primitive")
cultures as nostalgic interventions into the "First World's" public
sphere and for theorizing the comic as an ethnotainer or self-
ethnographer whose "pessimism" might be directed not just toward the
society in which the comedian walks but toward the limits and
possibilities of delivery such a message in a rational, rather than
serio-comic, manner; that is, the comedian eschews naïve faith in
non-duplicitous modes of both signification and knowledge
acquisition (itself a ploy for power in the comic's view). The
political or social critique the comic delivers grapples in both
form and content with that pessimism toward an innocent knowledge.
[Return to text]

5. My argument, to be sure, is not that stand-up performance takes
the place of the rational public sphere but rather that in addition
to psychological and economic explanations for its popularity, we
might also consider political explanations as well. In his
introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere, Bruce Robbins notes the
dominant story told in various writings from the 1960s onwards that
the public is in decline: "Publicness, we are told again and again
and again, is a quality that we once had but have now lost, and that
we must somehow retrieve" (viii). The contributors to Robbins'
volume contest the simplistic terms in which the public (state
administration) has been opposed to the private (market forces),
noting that in the "'republican virtue' model . . . the public means
community and citizenship, as distinct both from state sovereignty
on the one side and from the economy on the other" (xiii).
Elaborating on how "the lines between public and private are
perpetually shifting" (xv), the contributors to Robbins'
volume "try . . . to detect and evaluate publicness that is already
there in diverse forms, not a single norm or hypothesis set against
contemporary people, places, and instutions but a multitudinous
presence among the conditions of postmodern life" (xii, emphasis
added). In the same spirit, I turn to the comedy stage as an
alternate public sphere already there. [Return to text]

6. The child sequestered in the attic or cellar is a tried and true
convention of foundling fiction, where typically the orphan, who
often doesn't know he's an orphan, eventually discovers that the
cruel guardians looking after him are not his parents afterall. The
usual trajectory of this fiction moves from the rejection of the
false, unloving caretaker(s) - false because overrun by "aberrant
forms of desire" (Armstrong, 184) whether excessive appetite, greed,
prejudice, or political aspiration - to the restoration or adoption
of a new family coincident with the recovery of a well-ordered
household (c.f. Dickens' Oliver Twist). Cho alludes to this
restoration narrative even as she takes it in a different direction,
especially in her stand-up performance. [Return to text]

7. For Chaudhuri, home encompasses the sensibilities and discourses
of both belonging and exile: "The spatiality of modern drama
involves a complex figuration of its favorite setting, the domestic
interior. The idea of home . . . can be imagined as a semantic
spectrum whose two poles are occupied by the tropes of belonging and
exile. . . . In whatever quests, revolts, contest, and ambitions the
heroes of this drama get involved, they invariably encounter and
engage the issue of home, that is, of belonging and exile" (27).
[Return to text]

8. In a more extended version of this paper, I elaborate on the
airplane as both a public, rationalized as well as a private,
domestic space, one that immediately historicizes the narrator's
subjection formation. [Return to text]

9. With regard to this leakiness, the written memoir offers an
account of a childhood incident that results in Cho's being taunted
as the "Pee Girl" (13). The astonishing part of this story is that
the young Margaret feels simply a lack of horror at wetting her
pants. She is not bothered by this leakage, though terribly bothered
by her classmates' reaction: they shun her (in an act of urinary
segregation). [Return to text]

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political
History of the Novel. NY: Oxford UP.

Borns, Betsy. 1987. Comic Lives: Inside the World of American
Standup Comedy. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Bushman, David. 1996. Standup Comedians on Television. New York:
Harry N. Abrams Publishers.

Cho, Margaret. 2000. Margaret Cho, Filmed Live in Concert: I'm the
One that I Want. Prod. by Lorene Machado. Cho Taussig Productions.
NY: Winstar TV & Video, 2001.

---. 2001a. I'm the One that I Want. NY: Ballantine Books.

---. 2001b. "Notorious C.H.O." Live performance at the Universal
Ampitheater, September 13.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. NY: Vintage.

Koziski, Stephanie. 1984. "The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist:
Intentional Culture Critic." Journal of Popular Culture 18.2 (Fall):
57-75.

Limon, John. 2000. Standup Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in
America. Durham, NC : Duke UP.

Mintz, Lawrence E. 1985. "Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural
Mediation." American Quarterly 37.1 (Spring): 71-80.

Stebbins, Robert. 1990. The Laugh-Makers: Standup Comedy as Art,
Business, and Life-Style. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP.

Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness
of Play. N.p.: PAJ (Performing Arts Journal) Publications.

Watkins, Mel. 1994. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and
Signifying - The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor
that Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor.
NY: Simon and Schuster.