Review: Lisa Lampanelli: Long Live the Queen

I have a secret. I like irreverent sometimes offensive comedy. I really do. Women generally don't do it well though from my experience. There are a few women, I don't even remember most of their names, who do it. The other night I tried to watch a Sarah Silverman special on Showtime but I just couldn't bear it, it was so god awful, so I started channel surfing and voilà - another woman comic was about to entertain us on HBO, Lisa Lampanelli. I had never heard of her but I'm not about to forget her anytime soon.

If you appreciated Richard Pryor, worshiped George Carlin and like Chris Rock, you might like Lisa Lampanelli. You might hate her or maybe both. She's kind of like the comic you love to hate. Before you watch be forewarned about extraordinarily vulgar language, sexual references, racial jokes, and repeated slang references to body parts some of us wouldn't mention to our doctors without blushing. Lisa is an equal opportunity basher who somehow managed to get at least one example of each of her targets to sit in the front row of a huge auditorium in Santa Rosa, California for her first HBO Special. They loved every minute of it.

What I liked about her is she is very real. She's unabashedly thrilled to be on HBO and seems to really connect to this crowd of folks who share my secret. She loves them as a matter of fact, all the while poking fun of everything and anything she can think of about them, the gay men, the blacks, the Asians and Hispanics. She makes it clear that she adores her large audience of "homos", "spics" and "chinks". She prefers dating black men. Go figure. But I think that's precisely why she's so funny and her humor is so acceptable. I was waiting for some Pollack or Italian jokes but I guess I'm showing my age. She did manage a couple of really mild Jewish jokes. I'm not sorry to admit I found her to be hilarious, fresh and unique in a genre that few can pull off well. She was sort of like a female Don Rickles only funnier, a Richard Pryor without the drugs, and more slapstick than Chris Rock. She is as she is billed, the Queen of Mean!

So if you dare, check out her special on HBO,Lisa Lampanelli: Long Live The Queen, there are several more airings before the month is over.