Margaret Cho

Margaret Cho is a five-time Grammy and Emmy nominee. She released her second studio album, American Myth, earning her another Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album. In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine named her one of the 50 Best Stand-Up Comics, calling her “the sort of funny, sex-positive feminist and LGBT activist younger comics continue to look up to.”

Her 2018 Fresh off the Bloat tour was still going, even if Covid shuttered it down in 2020. When asked to describe how the show will evolve, she said, “When we go back out into a semblance of normal life, the show will take on everything that has happened while we were social distancing. It was a deep period of reflection where all comedians had to figure out how to live life without hearing laughter. It felt suffocating but also uplifting. I learned so much about myself and the world by staying still. I want to share the things I laughed at, alone, with the world.”

2019 and 2020 saw Cho jump back into acting roles. She kicked off ’19 as the Poodle on the first Season of the wildly successful show The Masked Singer on FOX, appeared in a 2019 episode of Law & Order: SVU and an episode of HBO’s critically acclaimed series High Maintenance. In 2020, Cho appeared in three films – she played a ruthless Hollywood movie studio exec in Faith Based, “Fairy Gay Mother 1” in Friendsgiving, starring Kat Dennings and Malin Akerman, and “Auntie Ling” in Netflix’s first major animated film, Over the Moon, which Vulture called “one of the most gorgeous, animated films ever made.” As if she wasn’t exercising that artistic muscle enough, she launched her own podcast, “The Cho Cho,” where the first part is a chat with a celebrity friend you already know, and the second part is with an up-and-coming artist you may not know yet.

With so much success in her creative life, Cho still finds time to support the causes that are important to her. She is incredibly active in anti-racism, anti-bullying, and gay rights campaigns. She was the recipient of the Victory Fund’s Leadership Award, the first-ever Best Comedy Performance Award at the Asian Excellence Awards, the First Amendment Award from the ACLU of Southern California, and the Intrepid Award from the National Organization for Women (NOW). Cho has been honored by GLAAD, American Women in Radio and Television, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), PFLAG and LA Pride, who gave Cho a Lifetime Achievement Award for leaving a lasting imprint on the LGBT community.

Cho was honored by the She Rocks Awards in January 2021. The award credits women who display unique talent and leadership within the music industry. Previous award recipients include Melissa Etheridge, Pat Benatar, Suzi Quattro, Chaka Khan, Ronnie Spector and more. It seems only fitting that Cho should start the new year alongside some other bad ass women.