Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Cho

Cho’s line reads like a confession delivered with a comedian’s calibrated exaggeration: the only way to tell the truth about devotion is to push it past politeness and into the language of worship. “Some people are that” is deliberately vague, a little breathless, as if the speaker can’t quite believe what they’re admitting. Then comes the escalation: parent, role model, anything “less than a religion.” Each rung is a social category we’re supposed to understand - family, mentorship, inspiration - and Cho tosses them aside one by one, implying they’re too small for the emotional reality.

The subtext is about the way celebrity, elders, and chosen family can become spiritual infrastructure, especially for people whose biological families or mainstream institutions didn’t offer shelter. Cho’s career has long lived in that territory: queer, Korean American, outspoken, turning private fracture into stage material. In that context, “religion” isn’t a Hallmark metaphor; it’s a pointed flex. Religion is what organizes shame and belonging, dictates who counts, provides rituals for survival. To say a person exceeds even that is to admit an intimacy that’s both sustaining and dangerously total.

There’s also a sly critique embedded in the reverence. When a person becomes your religion, the devotion can feel like salvation, but it also hints at dependency, at the absence of sturdier structures. Cho makes the worship sound funny because it’s a little alarming - and because humor is how you smuggle big need into a room without getting laughed out of it.