A & E

Life these days seems to be one giant stress test. If it's not the umpteenth bailout or stimulus going to help the other guy, it's having to toss your MacDonald's hamburger wrapper into a $1,000 Luke Ravenstahl commemorative trash can. Our advice: catch one, two or three of the big comedy shows headed to Pittsburgh this weekend, before Harrisburg and our local elected officials find a way to pass a laugh tax.

Friday, a reunited Cheech and Chong bring their joint efforts to the Benedum Center as part of their "Light Up America" tour, their first in 26 years. That same night, comic and CNN personality D.L. Hughley opens a three-night stand at the Pittsburgh Improv at the Waterfront in Homestead. Saturday, pretty and profane Margaret Cho gives her fans a Pacific rim shot at the Carnegie Music Hall in Munhall.

In the '70s, when Ozzy Osbourne was skinny and Robert Plant still could hit those high notes with Led Zeppelin, Cheech and Chong's stoner vaudeville made its own racket on the FM dial.

Routines like "Dave" and "Sister Mary Elephant" gave millions of high school kids the equivalent of a contact high. Richard "Cheech" Marin, with his panicked Chicano screech, was the treble. Tommy Chong, with his fuzz-tone drawl, laid down the bass.

Friday, Cheech and Chong bring their contraband comedy to the Benedum Center. Nearly three decades have gone up in smoke since they last toured together, but they sound in mid-tour form on a phone hookup from Marin's hometown of Los Angeles.

Getting a straight answer almost requires a federal warrant. Ask, for instance, which one of them just spoke.

"That was one of us," Chong says solemnly.

Do they get tired of people always assuming they're on drugs?

"Only when the person asking the question is wearing a uniform," Chong says.

Marin is set to have knee-replacement surgery when the tour ends.

"I'm going to have it replaced it with an elbow," he says. "It's more flexible."

But he turns serious when asked if they had doubts as to whether people would care if they got back together.

"Quite the opposite," Marin says. "We knew there was a big audience, because everywhere we went, it was like, 'When are you going to get back together?'"

The two met during the Nixon years in Chong's native Canada. He was running his brother's nightclub, the Shanghai Junk. He met draft-dodger Marin, one of eight children and the son of a Los Angeles police officer. The two formed a musical comedy act but found that the audience responded better to their spoken bits.

Their debut album went gold. "Big Bambu," in 1972, reached No. 2 on the Billboard charts. Then came the movie "Up In Smoke," with the glam parody "Earache My Eye." Flying high, they met everyone from Steelers hall-of-famer Jack Lambert to Mick Jagger.

"We were honorary Steelers back in the day when they had the Steel Curtain," Chong says. "They came to our show one time, and they made us honorary Steelers."

"Franco Harris is a big fan. I see him every once and a while at golf tournaments," Marin says.

They broke up in 1985, reportedly over Marin's desire to expand his ambitions into acting. He appeared in several films, including "Tin Cup" and "Grindhouse." He co-starred with Don Johnson in the '90s television detective series "Nash Bridges."

"Cheech left me for Don Johnson," Chong says. "He ran off in the middle of the night. He went out for cigarettes. He took the dog and he left for San Francisco."

"He was very roguish," Marin says of Johnson. "I couldn't resist. ... He had a speedboat."

But while Marin provided a character voice in Walt Disney's "The Lion King," Chong stuck doggedly to his anti-establishment roots, sometimes to his detriment. In 2003, he appeared in federal court in Pittsburgh, where he pleaded guilty to distributing 7,500 bongs and pot pipes through his Internet company, Nice Dream. He spent nine months in prison.

He's only sorry that he didn't get a chance to sell one of his bongs to Michael Phelps. A guy with that kind of lung capacity would have made an ideal spokesman, he says.

"He coulda used a bigger bong," Chong says. "That was kind of lightweight for a man of his caliber. He should have had a Chong bong."

One group who won't be at Margaret Cho's show Saturday at the Carnegie Music Hall in Homestead: Miley Cyrus fans.

Of course, most of the singer's tweener fan base are too young for Cho's raunchy stand-up. The Korean-American comic dishes with caustic hilarity on her bisexuality, race and her travails in show business.

But Cho evidently is on their radar now. After Cho denounced Cyrus for allegedly mocking Asians in a photo, some Cyrus fans defended their idol a little too ardently.

"I'm getting death threats from 12-year-old kids because they really love Miley Cyrus," Cho says.

If anything, that will only motivate the contrarian comic to turn up the volume. She reportedly has written a song about Cyrus and the controversy. A rabid punk-rock fan whose favorites include the Hives and Broken Social Scene, Cho often breaks out her electric guitar during her stand-up routine.

"I'm writing a lot of new things," she says. "I'm writing comedy songs. That's a big part of it. I play guitar, so there's a lot of that. I'm kind of becoming a guitar comic, which is fun."

Cho grew up in San Francisco and spent part of her childhood in her parents' native Korea. By the time she was 16, she was performing stand-up comedy. She developed her aggressive stage persona out of the need to be forceful, she says.

"I think when I started, people didn't take me seriously, because they didn't know what to make of me. I think I had to develop that because people didn't know what I was doing. In comedy, all people care about is that you know what you're doing. I have to appear like I'm in charge, and that's where it comes from. ... I'm not angry at all."

Cho is giving television another try. She'll appear in "Drop Dead Diva," a comedy drama on the Lifetime Channel. She also has a concert film, "Margaret's Beautiful," set for release this year.

In 1994, she had her own sitcom, the ill-fated "All American Girl." The show's producers considered her character to be too Asian one moment and then not Asian enough the next. She landed in the hospital with kidney failure after trying to lose weight for the role.

She talked about that experience in her 2000 one-woman show, "I'm the One That I Want."

"I noticed that most comedians are pretty shy people," she says. "We all try to find a way to make our voices heard. For me, because it was when I was so young when I started, I just had to be very, very outrageous to get attention."

That certainly hasn't changed. Cho, who says she has an open marriage with her husband, artist Al Ridenour, talks frankly about her bisexual affairs.

"I'm not curious," she says. "I know."

Raunchy and outspoken, D.L. Hughley doesn't care what anyone else thinks.

Hughley ran with the Bloods gang in South Central Los Angeles but quit the life when a cousin was gunned down. He found work as a telemarketer for the Los Angeles Times. He starred in the 2000 Spike Lee Film, "The Original Kings of Comedy," and starred in the TV sitcom "The Hughleys" from 1998 to 2002.

He hosted a late-night talk show on Comedy Central in 2005-06, "Weekends at the D.L." He filmed a one-hour special for that network, "Shocked and Appalled," and released a comedy CD, "Notes from the GED Section." He also starred in Aaron Sorkin's NBC drama series "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip."

Last year, CNN tapped Hughley to be the network's version of Jon Stewart by giving him his own hourlong news comedy show, "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News." It airs at 10 p.m. Saturdays.

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