Margaret Cho on ‘All About Sex,’ Playing Dictators and Robin Williams

We’ve got to stand up against this violence. It’s the next wave of protest. What really angered me about 2014 was the 258 Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram. They said the girls are fine, they’ve been married off, and I was like oh, no, we’ve got to go get ’em. I want to put together a pissed-off group of really angry women who will go over. We’ll crowd-fund, we’ll get Oprah to charter us a plane.

Who would you put in this girl gang?
Michelle Rodriguez, Courtney Love – you know she cannot wait to behead someone. I want Judge Judy. I want the scary Japanese bitches from The Grudge. I want Amanda Bynes. Because Amanda, you cannot help yourself until you help other people. And then we have our secret weapon: Solange. We need to train together, we need to all get on the same menstrual cycle, and then we’ll go the week before we get our period and we’ll tear them up. We have the power.

When you saw Solange elevator video for the first time. . .
I felt justified. I knew she would not kick his ass if he didn’t deserve it. I knew there was something we didn’t know, but she knew. I was like, take that shoe off, go for it. It made me feel so free to see her just go at him with that shoe. I just want her to have elevator cage fight: Solange Knowles and Ray Rice. Because women need to rise up. We’ve had enough suffering.

Your TV show All-American Girl was on in 1994. Can you believe it’s taken 20 years for the next network show about an Asian-American family, Fresh Off the Boat, to arrive?
It’s actually taken this long. There was another Asian-American family show called Sullivan Sons, but it was on cable. [Fresh Off the Boat creator and star] Eddie Huang and I worked together to make sure his voice is heard. I’m so proud of Fresh Off the Boat; it feels like a dream realized. I’m so grateful that he reached out to me during the development process. I felt like, wow, I actually am the only person that can help out, because I know what that’s like. I think the show is going to be great, and they don’t have to deal with the stuff that I was dealing with, because I was a young woman. When you’re a young woman in television, your body is judged as a kind of property. You have to be sexually viable. How are we not judged for our ability, why are we judged by our bodies and how our bodies age or gain weight? For me it was so heartbreaking because I looked at comedy as my savior from all that body shame.

Having played Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un, what’s the key to portraying a North Korean dictator?
What’s weird is it’s hard to do a real imitation because their images are so guarded, we don’t have a knowledge of what they sound like for real. You have to make it up. Half of my family’s from North Korea, so that sort of made it a little easier. I don’t know if my impression of him put them in work camp.