Arts Agenda - Cho better blues

Margaret Cho doesn’t watch sitcoms. “It’s not my favorite form of entertainment,” she says.

No wonder, really, considering the disastrous experience the 32-year-old comedian had with the genre in the mid-’90s, when ABC ran her “All American Girl” through the sitcom sausage maker, and Cho along with it.

Despite that experience, the world’s most famous fag hag returns to TV next month with an appearance on the season premiere of “Sex and the City,” one of the few shows she says she loves. “I watch it and I feel less alone in the world, and that’s what I want from great artists and great entertainment,” she says.

The idea of feeling less alone in the world dominates Cho’s new autobiography, I’m the One that I Want. The book shares its name with her successful one-woman show, which she took on a 40-city tour in 1999 and translated to a hit indie film in 2000.

But Cho sees the book and the movie as separate projects. Both render the comic’s life through a “Behind the Music”-type lens (early talent, big break, horrific fall into drugs and self-loathing, cathartic comeback). But the book goes into more gritty details of Cho’s chaotic life so far, from a childhood in San Francisco’s tres gay Polk Street district, where her Korean-born parents owned an adult bookstore, through her dope-fueled ride on the stand-up circuit and eventual fall from grace at ABC. A blend of confession, comedy and philosophical treatise, the memoir reads like a gossipy guide to life from a trash-talking rrriot girl who’s never had much respect for the mainstream.

“I directed the book almost at the young girl I once was,” she says. “I wish I’d had a book that told the truth about growing up as honestly as it does.”

With All American Girl, Cho became part of the first Asian-American family seen on primetime TV. But the network’s demands that she lose weight for the part and her complete lack of creative control left the show and its star in a lurch just months after its launch.

The author unflinchingly indicts herself and her friends in her downward spiral. “Some people in the book have had great difficulty with some of the truths I reveal about them,” she says. “I’ve had people more mad at me about this work than anything I’ve ever done. I feel like Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry, when everybody hates him.”

Cho started working on the book and the stand-up show at about the same time, which she says was a challenge at first.

“Stand-up is easy for me to write because stand-up comedy just happens. I don’t really have to sit down and think about it. But writing a book was a very intense experience in being with it every day and being inside of it.”

Now on a reading and book-signing tour, the comedian has had to again shift gears, bringing her fans along for the ride. “It’s a different kind of thing than I’ve ever done before, so people are really into it,” she says of the book tour. “There’s still a lot of humor in what I’m doing, but the book has a lot of serious parts, so people are getting more of a range of things from me.”

With the book tour, a new stand-up show in the works (“The Notorious C.H.O.,” her take on the power and sex appeal of the women of rap) and the “Sex and the City” appearance, doesn’t this triple-threat fear that the public may be getting close to a Cho-verdose? Not at all.

“You rarely hear about women of color doing anything from their perspective,” she says. “I feel it’s important. I don’t think there’s potential for overexposure. I think it’s good that it’s out there.”

Margaret Cho reads from I’m the One That I Want at Outwrite Bookstore and Coffeehouse, 991 Piedmont Ave., May 10 at 7:30 p.m. 404-607-0082.??