The notorious, “Whoa”

It’s been a while since an unapologetically chubby, bisexual Asian woman with a mouth about as clean as the Beer Barrel’s floor could really raise eyebrows. But fresh on the heels of her second film, The Notorious C.H.O., Margaret Cho is stirring up the comedic circuit in ways that few dare to do, causing one reviewer to claim that her material "is raunchy enough to make even Richard Pryor blush." The San Francisco native is famous for good-naturedly lampooning her Korean mother, getting dicey about eating disorders and, most of all, unabashedly chronicling her adventures in both homo and hetero sex—those real and those symbolic. ("I was there, day after day," she jokes of the post-Sept. 11 World Trade Center cleanup, "giving blow jobs to rescue workers.") While some of her jokes garner a gasp of surprise as much as a laugh, Cho is widely heralded for her unrelenting honest, superb voice inflection and right-on timing. She’ll be at the University of Nevada, Reno, Oct. 17; call 784-4444 for tickets.