Happiness Quote by Margaret Cho

Cho’s line lands like a dare wrapped in a confession: you think you’ve been “good,” but have you been free? As a comedian, she isn’t offering a soft self-care mantra; she’s weaponizing honesty. The repeated qualifiers - “if you really think about it, if you are really honest with yourself” - function like a tightening spotlight. They don’t let the listener slip away into vague agreement. She’s anticipating the reflexive objection (“I do take care of myself”) and calling it what it often is: a story we tell to survive the expectations we’ve internalized.

The specific intent is corrective, almost reparative. “Try” matters. She’s not scolding; she’s acknowledging how unfamiliar prioritizing your own happiness can feel, especially for people trained to be accommodating. Cho’s comedy has long been rooted in the pressure cooker of family obligation, gendered politeness, immigrant respectability politics, and the way marginalized people get rewarded for being low-maintenance. In that context, “put your happiness before anyone else’s” isn’t selfishness; it’s a counter-programming against a lifetime of being cast as someone else’s supporting character.

The subtext is darker than it first appears: if you’ve never chosen yourself, it’s not just because you forgot. It’s because something - family, culture, fear, economics, trauma - made self-erasure feel like the entry fee for belonging. Cho turns that bleakness into a practical challenge: audit your loyalties, notice where your “niceness” costs you, then make one unapologetic choice. The humor lives in the bluntness; the power lives in the permission.