Lisa Lampanelli is the Queen of the Mean - Mean Defined as Mediocrity

Comedian Lisa Lampanelli calls herself The Queen of Mean. After watching her latest HBO comedy special I think she is the queen of the mean.- Mean defined as mediocrity.

Lisa Lampanelli piqued my interest when I first saw her on a few of the celebrity roast shows. Irreverent and vulgar, her 3 minute spots were funny and unique. Unfortunately, a three minute spot on a celebrity roast does not make for an hour comedy special.

The first thing you notice about Lisa Lampanelli is her odd appearance. She wears something that looks like a floral patterned, confirmation dress, discarded in 1962. The dress is her clunky attempt to cover up her white, x-large figure. But the effect is reminiscent of the transvestite Devine, in a John Water's movie.

She trounces onto the stage following an introduction that refers to insult comedian Don Rickles as HB-Old. It's an unfortunate comparison. Don Rickles (Mr Warmth) will be 83 on May 8, but he's razor sharp. When I saw him last week on Jay Leno, once again he had me in stitches. Rickles is a naturally funny guy. He will improvise jokes and funny dialogue quicker that someone can light up a cigarette. Lisa Lampanelli couldn't tie Don Rickles's shoelaces, even if she could bend down that far.

Lampanelli's comedy is vulgar and racist. But that's not the only reason I don't like her act. It's because her comedy is scripted, and repetitive. The few times I've seen her on TV she'll make the same comments about how she likes to sleep with big virile black guys she calls hot, chocolate daddies. After you get over the shock, the bit wears thin. Bulletin to Lisa Lampanelli: Having sex with black guys doesn't prove you're not a racist. When the master had his way, with his black slave girls, the sexual act didn't make him enlightened. Her other standard line is that she'd like to bang a Hispanic, but she can't find one who has a job.

Lampanelli recalled an incident on the radio, when she said, "deaf people aren't handicapped they're just retarded." Some deaf people took offense and protested her live show, later that week. Commenting, she said, "What's wrong with this picture? I was on the radio, and their deaf." At least the joke wasn't recycled from her previous TV appearances, like most of her act.

I'm not crazy about insult comedy. I spent my teens admiring comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, who targeted the hypocrisy of the system, not the people in the audience.

I performed some stand up comedy at open stages in the 1980's but I quit because I had a bad case of stage fright. Here's what I learned about insult comedy from hanging around comedy clubs: Most comedians interact with the audience, but some harass people for cheap laughs. It's a fine line that most really good comedians don't cross.

Targeting people in the audience are an easy source of laughs. The most common technique is asking people what they do for a living, than making fun of their answers. Others in the audience will laugh out of embarrassment. Another common technique is when a comedian looks for young couples that look like they are on a first date, and then asks them how long they've been going out together. When they appear to be a little embarrassed by the situation, the comedian remarks, "I guess he's not getting anything tonight." I'm always amazed by how amiable most people are when they're being picked on by a comedian.

Good comedy should be about more than embarrassing people and exercising control and power over the audience. Comedy like other art forms should enlighten us, about our society and bring people together through laughter, a universal experience.

I saw Don Rickles live once, in the early 1970's, at the Latin Casino in South Jersey. What made Rickles so good was that he was so unpredictable when he interacted with the audience. When introduced, he walked out into the orchestra, stopped in front of the black drummer, spun the cymbal around like a steering wheel and said to the drummer, "get to the back of the bus." He picked on a black guy in the front during the entire performance. Nevertheless, the audience loved Don Rickles and everybody laughed and had a good time.

Rickles ended the show, by telling the audience, he loved and respected all ethnic groups in America. Then he gave the black guy in the front, a bottle of expensive champagne. I believe that Rickles was sincere, but after 90 minutes of ethnic stereotyping and racist jokes, the apology seemed hollow.

Don Rickles was much more talented than the insult comedian he perfected, and he spent the next 30 years carving out a career in TV and films. The ethnic stereotyping that Don Rickles featured in his act 35 years ago, would be strangely out of place in today's multi-cultural society. When you strip out the sexual content, Lampanelli's ethnic stereotyping is an anachronism, also.

Lisa Lampanelli is reminiscent of Andrew Dice Clay who was popular around 1990. Dice appeared as a hunky leather clad greaser who told raunchy jokes in a tough Brooklyn accent. He liked to tell obscene nursery rhymes, like this one: "Jack and Jill went up the hill. Each had a buck and a quarter. Jill came down with two fifty."

At the height of Dice's popularity there were a lot of fraternity boy yahoos, inanely repeating Dice lines like, "whad- a - homo oooo."

Dice Clay never existed, he was a character invented by a comedian named Andrew Silverstein: A fact that makes feminists like Nora Dunn, and Sinead O'Connor who protested his misogyny, seem silly. Aren't there enough real jerks in the world to protest, besides fictional characters?

The problem was, Silverstein wasn't really that talented. When Dice was on the Howard Stern Radio Show he came across as sluggish and slow on his feet. Because Silverstein couldn't take his comedy to the next level, he faded away. So will Lisa Lampanelli, eventually.

For the moment, Lisa Lampanelli is riding high. She's doing concerts, a book, DVD's and TV. The shock value of her act is drawing the public in, like a Roman gladiator exhibition.

A much more talented female standup comedian is Wanda Sykes who stars in The New Adventures of Old Christine, along with some other TV projects. She's topical, and naturally funny. Check out her concerts, and DVD's., Another comedian who has a current, HBO- standup special is Dana Gould. He's got a charming, low keyed approach that is funny and relatively clean.

The End