comedy preview

Lisa Lampanelli last month
AP
If you happened to wander into a
Lisa Lampanelli show and weren’t already familiar with her work—or hadn’t read any interviews with her—you might not get the joke right away.
You would hear what, at first blush, might sound like racist / homophobic jokes, aimed at blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, gays, etc. But, what Lampanelli is really engaged in is satire: She is satirizing / mocking these stereotypes, and those who are ignorant enough to believe them. In a way, she’s a stand-up version of the Archie Bunker TV-sitcom character than Norman Lear created in the early 1970s.
So, in that respect, what she does is partly social commentary.
“At first, part of the lure was me just seeing what I could get away with, but when I really got a sense of how many people still embrace these idiotic stereotypes, I became more and more drawn to calling out people who are that ignorant,” says Lampanelli.
More after the jump…