Even after 20 years of doing standup comedy, Margaret Cho is showing no signs of mellowing. If anything, the American comic who uses her Korean heritage and eccentric family members as ammunition is growing more savage in her skewering of racial and religious intolerance and America's politics.

Cho, one of the headliners at this year's CanWest ComedyFest, rose to prominence in the early 1990s as the star of the first Asian-American sitcom. In All American Girl, Cho played a character largely based on herself: the American-born daughter of immigrant Korean bookstore owners in San Francisco.

For a while there, she was dating Quentin Tarantino and seeing herself splashed across Hollywood billboards, but the pleasures of celebrity were short-lived. Her producer's concern over the "roundness" of her face led to crash-dieting, on-set collapse and temporary renal failure. The show faltered out of the gate and the producers started a series of increasingly ill-considered moves, at one point actually hiring Cho a consultant to help her with "her Asian-ness."

All America Girl was cancelled part-way through its first season, tipping Cho into a sinkhole of alcoholism and promiscuous sex. And we know all of this, because Cho eventually pulled herself together and made her failure the subject of a hugely successful one-woman show, I'm the One That I Want. That touring show, and subsequent spinoff DVD established her as a wickedly funny enemy of intolerance, a theme that she has continued to explore through a series shows and DVDs.

Her arsenal includes re-created monologues in the character of her eccentric mother, whose heavy Korean accent belies an acute observation of North American values; absurd juxtapositions; an array of comedic personas, including the sauciest drag queen this side of La Cage aux Folles; and an almost musical sense of sound repetition, in which she will intone a line over and over until it takes on a heightened significance.

"My work works on a few levels," she explains, by telephone from a film set in Atlanta where she is working on a small role. "I see that it works as a kind of educational tool ... The voice itself is a funny voice.

"I have a different take on the immigrant experience. Younger Korean-Americans are enthusiastic about my work. Even older Korean-American audiences approve of my existence."

Cho's early comedy relied on her audience's fundamental good-heartedness: she was not preaching to roomfuls of bigots. Her pointed reminders that people of colour still had to work harder for equality in the United States were easy to take. One of the funniest passages in I'm the One That I Want has Cho bringing her Irish-American boyfriend home to meet her family, who cluck over the man for having eyes that are "too big."

Cho's comedy has grown harsher since that debut. Her monologues now are filled with toe-curling invective against American politics and the misadventures of President George W. Bush in particular. By 2004, and her Revolution tour and DVD, she was flying straight into the storm, dismissing the religious right as "Bible-thumping, cousin-humping, monster truck enthusiasts."

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