Margaret Cho Reveals Rift With Ellen DeGeneres: ‘She Was Really Mean’

Margaret Cho revealed a decades-long rift with fellow standup comedian Ellen DeGeneres.

“Ellen was really weird and not nice to me for most of my career,” Cho, 56, declared on the “Kelly Mantle Show” podcast on Friday, June 20. “I opened for her in the 1980s, when she was a headliner in comedy clubs. Later, when I would do her talk show in the 2000s, she would act like we just met!”

Cho added, “I’m like, ‘Bitch, what?’ That’s weird. We go way back. It’s so creepy and weird!”

She recalled an incident that allegedly occurred when she attended a David Bowie concert while wearing a“giant Chinese emperor outfit.” According to Cho, Bowie complimented her outfit during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show the next day, but the entire anecdote was cut from the episode.

“It made me so mad,” she remembered. “The producer, who was a really good friend of mine, had to call and tell me, ‘I can’t believe she did this but she cut it out of the show. But you need to know that he was going on and on about your outfit! God said your name.’”

Cho insisted, “[It’s] so rude! I don’t know if it was personal, maybe it [cut] was for time. But still, I’m going to take it personally just because I decided to.”

Us Weekly has reached out to DeGeneres’ representative for comment.

Cho is not the only comedian to publicly take issue with DeGeneres. Rosie O’Donnell exclusively told Us in May that, while she holds no “malice” towards DeGeneres, they had “some stuff in the past that [they] never resolved.”

“Not in any way as, as partners or lovers or anything like that, just as friends and comedians, but I wish her the best. I seriously do,” she told Us. “I think that there’s enough room in the world for all of the gay comedians, and we all need to stick together because gay people are the next group to be threatened. And the way they attack trans people is absolutely terrifying. If people don’t understand that they’re a vital part of the LBGTQIA+ community, that’s tragic.”