Margaret Cho Returns To Stand-Up Comedy

Margaret Cho used to play this game with bosom buddy Quentin Tarantino where they kept tabs on who got their name in the paper most.

These days, the king of “Pulp Fiction” is making a killing in that department, but Cho, poster child for Generation X, has been teething on the fruits of near-stardom. She’s not taking things sitting down.

With her ABC sitcom “AllAmerican Girl” on hiatus and in limbo (ABC hasn’t yet decided whether to bring it back a second season), Cho is going back to her stand-up-comedy roots, touring 20 cities this summer.

Cho, who hit the big time on the club circuit joking about growing up Asian-American in the happy (if not dazed and confused) ‘70s, is giving her Korean family a break this time around. They are no longer the butt of her jokes. Reaching relative fame is.

“It’s about what it’s been like not being a famous person, but a relatively famous person, while all of the experiences are still new to me,” says Cho, 26.

Like the time she attended a meeting at Madonna’s office. OK, Madonna wasn’t there. But she got to check out her desk and swing around in her chair.

“I touched her phone and stuff,” Cho said this week from her Hollywood Hills bungalow, decorated in a retro-futuristic style inspired by the 1971 movie “A Clockwork Orange.”

She was born and raised in San Francisco. Her Korean parents were somewhat liberal, she says, but by Korean standards, “They’re Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary.”

In the late ‘80s, after enrolling in the San Francisco State University’s theater program and discovering there were few dramatic roles available to Asian women, Cho turned to comedy. She developed her routine at a small club above her parents’ bookstore, where she worked part time. “On my breaks I would go upstairs and do a set. My parents were less than thrilled.”

She did a series of comedy houses after that, and by 1992 was doing the TV circuit A&E’s “Evening at the Improv,” Fox’s “Comedy Strip Live,” MTV’s “Half-Hour Comedy Hour,” and VH-1’s “Comedy Spotlight.”

She grabbed the attention of producers at Disney in 1993, which began producing “All-American Girl” for ABC in 1994.

She’s been basking in celebritydom ever since. The woman who grew up dreaming about doing a guest spot on “Love Boat” has been like an Xer in a pop-icon store since she got her own sitcom last year and started meeting some of her childhood idols.

“If you hang out long enough, you get to meet really cool people,” she says.

It was by hanging out that Cho wound up having dinner one night with her demigod, John Travolta.

“I had nothing to say to this great creature. When you are in the presence of these people you want to be able to talk to them as a person, not as somebody you have worshiped for years,” she says. “I mean, I’m somebody who saw ‘Grease’ like 42 times in two months. I can’t deal with the reality of these people.”

Cho is getting a chance to be in the movies herself.

She has just wrapped up work on director Randal Kleiser’s low-budget feature film “It’s My Party,” a comedy-drama in which she plays the best friend of an L.A. decorator (played by Eric Roberts) who decides to commit suicide rather than succumbing to AIDS. But not before he throws himself a big bash.

Kleiser, by the way, is none other than the director of “Grease.” And Olivia Newton-John actually has a part in the new movie. Cho is beside herself.