Margaret Cho has revealed how her sense of humour saved her life during a suicide attempt in 2013. The comedian, now 52, tried to hang herself from a shower curtain rail in a hotel room, but the rail bent under her weight. She joked: 'I thought, I'll go on a diet and try again when I reach my goal weight – which means I'm never going to kill myself, because I'll never reach my goal weight.'
Cho, whose memoir describes years of alcoholism, drug addiction and depression, credits comedy with preserving her life. 'Humour and laughter is the intake of breath, which is the preservation of the body for the next moment,' she said. 'At your darkest moments, it's actually the thing that shines the brightest.'
Speaking about the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, Cho said the problem predates Donald Trump's 'Chinese virus' rhetoric. She pointed to the 1871 Chinatown massacre in Los Angeles as evidence of deeper historical racism. 'His casual racism is more a symptom of the greater problem than the cause,' she said of the former president.
In March, eight people were killed at Asian spas in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American women. Cho, who lived in Atlanta for seven years, said the victims reminded her of herself. 'They're all women about my age,' she said, referring to the Korean-American victims. Cho's podcast, The Margaret Cho: Mortal Minority, will explore historical hate crimes against Asian Americans.
