Before Margaret Cho became a legendary comedian, Emmy-nominated actor, and one of the most influential voices in stand-up comedy, she was a 15-year-old kid who had just been expelled from one of San Francisco’s most prestigious high schools for truancy and bad grades, with parents who had essentially given up on her. Then James Jackson, an English teacher with a Southern drawl, a speech impediment, and a vintage motorcycle, started writing notes in the margins of her essays that changed everything: A+, so great, brilliant, funny.
In this deeply personal and unguarded conversation, the trailblazing comedian sits down with David Begnaud to share the story of the man who believed in her when she was just trying to blend into the walls.
Margaret opens up about meeting Mr. Jackson at the School of the Arts in San Francisco, a teacher who rode a motorcycle, wore a leather jacket with cigarettes in the sleeve, and spoke like a Southern Barbara Walters. She talks about the composition book he gave her at the beginning of the year, how his handwritten encouragement in the margins reignited the excellent student she had forgotten she was, and why his gentle belief felt so tender it was almost poetic. She shares what it was like to watch him get bullied by jocks in the classroom for being gay, how that made her feel as a closeted teenager herself, and the day she and her best friend Jerry walked out of school forever after those same jocks mocked Mr. Jackson’s murder. She reflects on learning decades later that Mr. Jackson had been killed by a homeless teenager he had taken in, and how court documents revealed allegations that Mr. Jackson had sexually abused the boy who killed him.
There’s also a raw reflection on trauma, survival, and what it means to separate the art from the artist. Margaret talks about being sexually abused by multiple people as a young girl in the 1970s and 80s, a time when young girl sexuality was disturbingly normalized, and how her parents denied it happened and still refuse to talk about it today.
She opens up about being raped in high school, headlining the first primetime ABC sitcom starring an Asian American woman in 1994, and being told by network executives that she was too fat to play herself. She shares what it felt like to lose 30 pounds in two weeks on fen-fen, urinate blood in her trailer from kidney failure, and be told not to gain the weight back even after her hair fell out. She reflects on spending a year and nine months in treatment for addiction, learning to wear sobriety like a loose garment, and why comedy is a coping mechanism that gives you hope by making you take an unexpected breath.
As complicated as the story is as we present it, Margaret reflects on what she would want to say to Mr. Jackson, why his encouragement led her to encourage younger comedians the same way, and why she’s really happy now after arranging her life in the right way.
