Lampanelli Adds Insult To Ingenuity

Lampanelli Adds Insult To Ingenuity

Lisa Lampanelli says dreadful and appalling things for a living. She shamelessly machine-guns racial and ethnic groups, and regularly sticks it to gays, women and "retards."

She is a cartoon of unsuppressed hatreds and unmedicated hostilities. She's also as foul-mouthed as a Marine.

People love her for it.

Like her idol, Don Rickles, Lampanelli has elevated -- probably the wrong verb -- insult and shock to its own kind of comic art. At the moment, the 47-year-old Lampanelli is the hottest female stand-up comic not named Sarah Silverman, and a budding conglomerate. Within the past year, "the Queen of Mean" has sold out both Radio City and Carnegie Hall on an endless comedy tour (tonight, she rolls into Washington for two shows at the Warner Theatre).

Next Saturday, HBO will air her first stand-up special ("Long Live the Queen"); the network is also developing a series with her. Her autobiography ("Chocolate, Please," a reference to Lampanelli's fondness for dating black men) arrives later this year. And so, too, might a Broadway show she's co-writing.

Like Rickles, Lampanelli's paint-peeling persona is partly well-honed shtick and partly an extension of her personality. It's just that it's hard to know which is which.

"What kind of name is that?" she asks, by way of greeting during a phone interview.

What kind of name does she think it is?

Lampanelli tries out several possibilities, all of them accompanied by a different foul-mouthed barrage. Nope. Wrong. Told the actual derivation, she doesn't hesitate. More bile.

Nice to meet you, too.

"I call myself an insult comic," she says. "I take no pride in being called a comedian. I like 'insult comic' because nobody can [bleeping] do it."

It's a delicate balancing act, really, she says. Years of performing have taught Lampanelli how far she can push things, when she can mash down on the accelerator and when to take her foot off. Plus, people know what they're getting when they pay $40 to see her. Nowadays, very few people walk out of her shows, and her hate mail is down to a trickle.