No Lines Will Be Left Uncrossed — Lisa Lampanelli, Insult Comedian, at Sam’s Town [Corrected 10/10/08]

By Mark Jordan

Early in her working life, Lisa Lampanelli, the Grammy-nominated insult comic who performs Saturday at Sam’s Town Casino’s River Palace Entertainment Center, was in these shoes.

After graduating from Syracuse University, Lampanelli, born Lisa Lampugnale in Trumbull, Conn., started a career in journalism, interviewing “hair bands” for magazines like Hit Parader and Rolling Stone. After a decade on the beat, Lampanelli abandoned journalism for comedy, but her former career still provides fodder for her current one.

“I got sick of it because how many times can you ask the same questions to retard hair bands and have them give you the same blank stare and/or bad answer,” Lampanelli says of her stint in music journalism. “I got sick of earning 12 grand a year and decided to upgrade, and it worked out because now – don’t be jealous – I’ve got two houses and two Toyota Camrys with rims.”

Saturday’s will not be a family show. In her rapid rise to the foremost ranks of today’s comics, Lampanelli has made her name as the successor to Don Rickles and Jackie Mason, that most biting of showbiz animals, the insult comic. At a Lisa Lampanelli concert, every member of the audience, every foible and physical characteristic, is fair game. Class, race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, political persuasion and physical disabilities – the self-styled “Queen of Mean” attacks all with equal, frequently profane, vigor.

Understandably, her routines have landed her in trouble, like last year when, on the radio promoting a show at the Rochester Institute of Technology, home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, she tossed off the line “God hates deaf people” among others.

But Lampanelli insists she does not deal with cultural sensitivities; it would kill the comedy. Her one and only currency is funny.

“If you’re crying at a comedy show, you have a lot worse problems than me,” she laughs. “There is no line you cannot cross. The only line in comedy is: Is it funny? If it’s not funny, take it out of your act because nobody wants to hear your therapy session and your prose. They’re paying for punch lines. So don’t sit there and go, ‘I’m going to talk to these people like I talk to my shrink,’ ’cause they paid money.”

Lampanelli got into comedy through deejaying. She was 30 before she was ready to take the mic in front of an audience, but she had her comedic bearings almost from the start.

“I used to notice that my biggest laughs and the stuff that I liked the most was stuff about the audience or about crowd work or about the other comics, making fun of them. So I just kept doing what I liked and this is where it led.”

It led to regular appearances on “The Howard Stern Show,” two specials on the Comedy Central television network, and a Grammy nomination last year for her best-selling album, Dirty Girl .

In 2002, however, Lampanelli found perhaps her purest vehicle in that Borscht Belt institution, the roast. That year, Lampanelli was among the comics tapped to deliver a New York Friar’s Club roast of actor-comedian Chevy Chase. Since then, she has made the medium her specialty, stealing the show on Comedy Central celebrity roasts of Pamela Anderson, Jeff Foxworthy, Flavor Flav and William Shatner.

“It’s hard because I always have to go last because I’m clearly the best,” Lampanelli says, only half-joking. “Comedy Central always makes me go last, and I have to do jokes nobody’s said the whole night. So I have to write 25 pages while these other idiots only have to write five. So (the roasts) are difficult from the perspective of being me, but then again I like a challenge. And I like that all the guys are scared to go after me.”

Lampanelli has several new projects lined up. On Nov. 21, she tapes her first television special for HBO, long the standard for when a comic has made it.

“As a resume changer, as a critical mark in your career, it’s huge,” she says.

Also in the works for Lampanelli is a pilot for an HBO dramedy based on her life with Jim Carrey as executive producer. And she recently started work on her autobiography, the start of a literary career she hopes to continue with an advice book and a guide to dating black men.

“I’ve been working on it the past couple of months,” she says of the autobiography. “It’s pretty intense, but it’s humorous. That’s the great thing about being a comic. … You can just do you and people laugh, and there are little essays in there about my views on life. So it’s funny, but it also gives people insight into what a creepy upbringing I had to make me be like this.”

Showtime is 8 p.m. Tickets are $38.25 at Sam’s Town’s box office and through Ticketmaster.

Casino juke joint

Wednesday is another installment in WDIA’s 2008 Juke Joint Tour at Sam’s Town’s River Palace Entertainment Center. The brainchild of WDIA’s longtime deejay and program director Bobby O’Jay, the tour features well-known soul blues performers on the casino’s main stage.

Doors open at 6 p.m. Music runs from 7-10 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, visit am1970wdia.com.

Originally published by Mark Jordan Special to The Commercial Appeal .

(c) 2008 Commercial Appeal, The. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.