Margaret Cho arrives in Good on Paper like someone who’s lived every version of the entertainment industry—from scrappy stand-up nights to sitcom sets to music studios—and survived all of them with her sense of humor intact. The Netflix film, written by and starring Iliza Shlesinger, gave Cho something she surprisingly doesn’t get often: the chance to act with the writer. “It’s a rare pleasure to act with the writer,” she says. “You know you’re dealing with the visionary who created the vision.” It reminded her of working with Tina Fey on 30 Rock, where the words and the performance came fused together—no guessing, no translating, just doing the thing with the person who actually dreamed the thing up.
The movie shadows the grind of auditions, rejection, and the tiny personal victories comedians cling to just to stay in the game. Cho points out one of her favorite parts: the scenes of Shlesinger’s character leaving the club after a good set, purse over her arm like a quiet fist pump. “I know that feeling,” Cho says. “It corrects all the auditions where you didn’t get the job.” For Cho, comedy offers a certainty the acting world often can’t. You might bomb a set, but at least the job is yours.
Music, for Cho, is something else entirely—still personal, still vulnerable, but driven by a completely different industry logic. She lights up talking about her 2016 album American Myth, especially the aching “Gorgeous Sky.” But she’s under no illusion that the music world behaves like comedy or film. “Music is such a different industry,” she says. “The way people listen now, the way artists survive… it’s weird.” Touring used to be a lifeline for musicians; now it’s a negotiation with uncertainty. Stand-up is tough, but at least it’s just you and a mic. Music requires infrastructure—or at least a van that starts.
Still, Cho misses live shows. The last one she almost saw was Orville Peck—then the world shut down mid-dressing-room hang. She laughs: “He ended up coming to my show instead.” Since then, she’s returned to comedy clubs, easing back into crowds, waiting for the moment when music feels like home again.
The conversation veers—delightfully—into the new wave of young women reclaiming songwriting and guitar fuzz like it’s 1994 all over again. Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Soccer Mommy, beabadoobee—Cho loves this whole generation. “They’re straight out of the riot grrrl loins,” she says. “I can hear Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, Velocity Girl.” In Cho’s mind, she and her peers are the grandmothers of this lineage, watching the DNA mutate into something more self-knowing, lyrically precise, and gloriously meta. “I love a song that’s subtly about Ryan Adams,” she laughs. “The children of the songwriters are writing songs about the songwriters.”
But back to Good on Paper, which contains one scene so unexpectedly gruesome that even Cho laughs describing it: a moment involving a heavy-looking door, a body double, and a piece of mango masquerading as human skin. “The hardest part,” she says, “was pretending the door was heavy. It was feather-light. It would swing open if you breathed on it.” The sequence gave her big Bound energy—the ’90s neo-noir from the Wachowskis starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. “I love that movie,” she says. “The comedy, the darkness, the tension.”
And because Good on Paper is, at its root, a romantic cautionary tale, Cho naturally has dating horror stories of her own. Plenty of them. “The most horror stories happen with men,” she says, and leaves it at that—though she can’t resist revisiting the surreal early days of internet dating. “You never knew who you were meeting. No reverse image search. People didn’t even know how to present themselves online.” She remembers a Y2K-era gem: she and a stranger simultaneously discovering they were both “the girlfriend” of the same man. “Very rom-com. Very horror,” she says. “Very 2000.”
As for what comes next, Cho is finishing a new album anchored by piano, Mellotron, and a Moog Grandmother—her own analog rebellion. “It’s coming,” she teases. Cho’s never been easy to categorize, and she’s not starting now. If anything, Good on Paper proves she can hold the center of whatever genre she steps into—comedy, film, music, or dating-story detective work.
No matter the medium, Margaret Cho’s voice always cuts clean.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
