On Late Night, Margaret Cho shares some politically incorrect thoughts on race relations


Comedian Margaret Cho had lots of things to say on Tuesday's Late Night, beginning with how her fingers are weirder than host Seth Meyers' (they really are). When talk turned to the Golden Globes — Meyers helped write the jokes for hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and Cho had a cameo as a North Korean general — Cho noted that some people expressed outrage that she would portray a Korean person. (Cho is Korean-American.) The critics, she said, were almost all white.
And Cho was ready with an explanation: "White people like to tell Asian people how to feel about race because they're too scared to tell black people." Meyers went along with the bit. "It's a jackpot for us," he agreed. "We want to scold people about race, too, but we're too scared, so for us, when you do something like that, we're like, 'Here we go!'" Cho wasn't finished: "Whenever white and black people fight, Asians and Mexicans don't know what to do. You know, because we're, like, 'Um, are we white?' We just want to be on the winning side."
Oddly, in the second part of the interview, Cho sounds pretty unimpressed with all the complaints from comedians about a surge of joke-killing political correctness. Comedians should have the right to tell impolitic jokes, but their job is to, "in a way, just make people happy."
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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