Margaret Cho, courtesy Sergio Garcia.

Comedian Margaret Cho has seemingly been everywhere on screen recently, from the wildly successful Hulu movie “Fire Island” to Comedy Central’s “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens,” 2020 animated film “Over The Moon” (which was nominated for an Oscar), 2021’s “Good on Paper” and Netflix’s 2022 “Stand Out Comedy Special.” Cho also made appearances on HBO Max hits “The Flight Attendant” and “Hacks,” and is currently starring in “The L Word: Generation Q” on Showtime.

Cho, who likes to stay busy, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“For me, it’s really about doing everything. What’s great about the way that I do stand-up is … unless it’s a big tour or something, it’s mostly focused on the weekends. Then during the week, I can go into TV and movie stuff,” the 54-year-old said a couple of days before Christmas from her home in Los Angeles, where she’s lived full-time since 2016. “I generally try to work all the time if I can.”

The San Francisco native, named by Vogue as one of its nine best female comedians of all time and by Rolling Stone as one of its 50 best stand-up comics of all time, is about to undertake another big tour.

Live and LIVID! marks 40 years in comedy and promises plenty of wit and wrath about the state of the world. Cho said that while her routines will be changing along with the day’s headlines, she’d got plenty to say about being queer, being an Asian American woman and being progressive.

On this day, she’s got many thoughts on the situation of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the latter of whom interviewed her for her podcast last fall about harmful Asian stereotypes. Now’s she’s drawing parallels from their stories.

“I’ve been following their story; to just see that vitriol that really exists because a woman of color is not even really creating that much change but just altering the vision of what a ‘royal family’ can do,” Cho said. “You see the disgusting disease of white supremacy, of racism, of sexism that is completely taken as normal. That kind of stuff is so disturbing to me.”

Margaret Cho, courtesy Sergio Garcia.

In the same breath Margaret Cho pivots to Donald Trump’s crudely made NFTs, which she said could have been better made by the Lensa AI app.

“It’s this grift again, preying on poor working-class white Americans that actually believe that he’s going to help them; that he even cares about what’s going on,” Cho said.

Cho pivots again, this time comparing the number of children killed with guns to the fabricated threat (often posed by evangelicals) to America’s children by drag shows.

“I am so upset about drag shows being terrorized by Christian evangelicals who have no business in drag, or why they are even trying to frame my community, the LGBTQIA community, as being groomers somehow,” she said. “I’m a survivor of sexual abuse as a child. I have also been a member of the queer community for my entire life, and I have never encountered it within the queer community. It’s always been straight people. It’s always been straight men. … The greatest cause of death for children is guns. That’s the major thing the Christian community is trying to promote—guns. Where is Jesus in that?”

Cho plans to talk about these very real issues, trying to make sense of that, by both poking fun and communicating how she really feels.

“There’s so many things to be mad about,” she said. “It’s funny, but it’s not. It’s funny, but it’s horrible. It’s funny, but the stakes are very high.”

Cho said performing in San Francisco, where she grew up as the daughter of bookshop owners and began performing stand-up when she was still in her early teens, is still special for her even though her family and friends have moved away. She performed a private show at a conference last year, but her last public show in the Bay Area was at SF Sketchfest in 2020. She also views the Palace of Fine Arts, where she’s performing on the Live and LIVID! tour, in high regard.

“I’ve been doing shows there since the late ‘80s. It’s where the Exploratorium was!” she said. “Now, when I go back [to San Francisco], I like to go to Haight Street, the Castro. I miss just going and hanging out.”

The rest of the tour spans both coasts, with multiple shows in several cities. But outside of this tour, Cho continues to stay busy with TV and film work, including the current “The L Word: Generation Q.” Her future projects include a new show with Gina Rodriguez and Martin Mull coming later this year.

She’s got several indie films in development that she said are digging deeper into the Asian identity, and she’s working on new music for a new movie based on a song she released in 2015 called “Ron’s Got a DUI,” the video for which featured her friend, the late Leslie Jordan. Jordan was also supposed to star in the film. At the time of this interview, Cho was preparing to host a celebration of life for Jordan that would be held at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in February.

The music that she’s writing for the film right now is a step outside her comfort zones of comedic and power pop—Cho has released two music albums; most recently 2016’s American Myth.

“I’m still active within songwriting, but not in the way that I was,” she said.

And Cho said she’d really like to explorer the horror genre. She said she loves horror films and rattled off a lengthy list of her favorites from 2022, including Spanish film “Piggy,” Taiwanese movies “The Sadness” and “Incantation,” and Thai/South Korean film “The Medium.”

“I always love Asian horror films,” she said. “Within Asian culture, a lot of times, the supernatural is built into society. The supernatural and the natural exist side by side, like when we have Thanksgiving, it’s also to celebrate the dead. We have tables where we give food for the dead and stuff. … You do these ceremonial things for other worldly entities. It’s a very natural thing to believe in the supernatural. That’s why our horror films are always one-up, super scary; because they already exist in the same plane.”

Outside of work—which, granted, isn’t a lot of time—Margaret Cho has been getting into VR gaming, which she described as an inventive way to communicate with the world, and catering to her three cats and Chihuahua Lucia, who accompanies her almost everywhere. The best recent development in her life, and one that gives her hope, she joked, was that one of her cats stopped vomiting right after eating.

“My main job is to take care of them, but then I get to do stand up comedy and do movies and TV on the side,” she said. “My whole life is really just in service of these animals.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.