"Queen of Mean" Lisa Lampanelli

From the moment she calls for an interview, it's obvious why comedian Lisa Lampanelli is so often misunderstood; as she blares a greeting like a foghorn through my speakerphone, her foul mouth requires a generous translation:

"Hello, you big dirty faggot!"

In Lampanelli language, that translates roughly to, "Good morning, good sir. How fare thee?" (Perhaps followed by a tip of the hat brim and the dignified rubbing of a monocle.)

Meeker journalists might yank out the phone cord in an indignant rage of Oh-No-You-Di'int! proportions. But luckily, I speak Lampanelli's dialect: between her Grammy-nominated comedy album ("Dirty Girl"), her recent HBO comedy special ("Lisa Lampanelli: Long Live the Queen"), and numerous on-air appearances alongside shock jock guru Howard Stern, I've become intimately familiar with the taboo-busting, button-pushing humor of the "Queen of Mean." She's an equal opportunity offender, taking potshots - okay, sometimes throwing sucker punches - at every marginalized sexual, racial and ethnic group in the room. Yet audiences keep showing up, as they will during her two shows in Boston on March 7, to be lashed with her tongue like dirty dogs. Trust me, there's no safety word in sight. Chances are, though, you won't mind.

She lives to tease

"Oh no, faggots never get mad at me, that's the thing," explains Lampanelli. "The lesbos can go either way. Sometimes the les-boos get all angry because I'm not willing to jump on to the tuna boat and they want me so badly because I'm such a tasty piece of ass. The fags have always had the best sense of humor ... but I've noticed in the audiences that the lesbos are starting to come around and like me, maybe because they're not taking things so seriously anymore."

"God bless them. I'll take them all," she adds. "I'll take all your money, you dirty faggots!"

Faint hearts (and anyone who has ever worked in human resources) may find it shocking that Lampanelli enjoys such wide success in the gay community. While she's "not Kathy Griffin, as in not my whole audience is gay," she estimates that a solid quarter of her comedy crowds are of the LGBT persuasion. The rest is probably made up of all the other groups she loves and lives to tease: "the blacks" (as in, African-Americans) to "the spics" (as in, Latinos and Hispanics) and "the retards" (as in... Oh God. Is my mother going to read this?).

"Can you believe, some bitch wrote me a letter that said, 'Don't make fun of the retarded,'" recalls Lampanelli. "She said, 'Retarded people have no choice but to be that way. Make fun of the blacks and the spics.' I'm like, what is the logic in that? It makes no sense, because obviously being black is much worse than being retarded. I don't get her point."

Divisive, right? You're either rolling on the floor laughing your ass off, or picking up your venom-filled pen to write a reader response right now (or if you're reading this online, you're either, like, ROFLMAO or OMG!-ing.). Lampanelli is fully aware that her brand of humor isn't for everyone, but she also believes that if you're going to go blue, you ought to go all the way.

"There's no such thing as too far," she says. "If you start drawing lines, where do you stop?"

Most importantly, she believes that her audiences respond to her because they can sense that her humor has, believe it or not, heart.

"I only make fun of people I have real warmth toward," she says. "The colored, the spics and the ass pirates. And a chink, here and there. Basically, all the disenfranchised people who smell and live in America."

A heart of gold

"I don't make fun of people I genuinely hate, like the French and all the Europeans who think they're smarter than us. If you make fun of people you actually don't like, it comes off badly. So yeah, I only hurt the ones I love. It's a beautiful thing."

And believe it or not, Lisa Lampanelli loves pretty much everyone. She might delve into racial humor, but black guys are also her preferred dating pool even if she can rarely hold on to one: "I don't know what it is about the colored, they always escape me like it's The Amistad."

She loves the gay community, too. Gay men, especially, including her best friend (lovingly referred to as Gay Faggot Wendell), who once toured with her as an opening act. "All my friends are gay men and straight women," she says. "I have no use for a straight guy unless they're hot and black."

She also thinks she knows why gay men love her.

"I have two theories," she explains. "One thing is that faggots love me because they think I'm a drag queen ... they think I'm tucking it with duct tape. They think I'm a drag queen, I'm like, 'Cool!' I [also] think they like me because every gay man really wants to be a big-titted brazen broad. That's what you all want to be, admit it!"

"I'm a freaking sweetheart," she adds. "Most people don't realize I have a heart of gold. They don't know what lurks inside Lisa
Lampanelli's snatch."

Guilty as charged?

"I think gay men have a better sense of humor because they either have enormous amounts of self-love because they've been to therapy, or huge self hate because they're fags and their parents hate them."

Lampanelli hopes the gays show up in droves for her Boston shows. In fact, before she transferred to Syracuse University to study journalism, she spent her first year of higher education at Boston College. She left because of the lack of diversity (no, seriously).

"It was too many Catholic white people," she says. "If I wanted to be around them I would have stayed in Connecticut."

But wait, a good Italian girl like Lisa Lampanelli had too much Catholicism in her life?

"Let me tell you something," she says. "I had the nuns and my mother. Then I had the priests. The only hot looking one was Father Guiliani; when I was 12 I was horny for him. I cut the communion line to go to him instead of the old priest with the face that looked like roast beef. Other than that, I have no use for the church."

Besides her trip to Boston, Lampanelli is excited for a few other projects on the horizon: her autobiography - "Chocolate, Please" - will be published this fall ("It sounds like a list of all the black guys I've banged," she says), and she's about to shoot the pilot for a weekly HBO show, executive produced by Jim Carrey.

Though she's built an empire as "Queen of Mean," Lampanelli admits she does have a soft spot.

"In my cunt," she says. "No, no. They say I'm like a Tootsie Pop: hard on the outside and soft on the inside, I just need to stop telling people to lick me."

In fact, there's a complicated gal behind the sharp edges and heavy eyeliner.

"My friend told me, 'I have no doubt you'll be great in your TV show, because you can display all emotions... except happy, you'll have to learn that,'" she laughs. "Which is totally true, cause I don't think I've ever really been happy."

Never?

"Really happy? Content? Living at peace? Serene? Absolutely not. I'm tortured. I'm always jumping around, trying to do stuff and make [everybody] like me."

"I'm a freaking sweetheart," she adds. "Most people don't realize I have a heart of gold. They don't know what lurks inside Lisa Lampanelli's snatch."

For a few moments, it seems we've had a breakthrough. Then, it's time to go.

"Bye, you big dirty faggot!" And click goes the line.

Bye, you big dirty bitch. I love you, too.

Lisa Lampanelli will appear on Saturday, March 7 at The Wilbur Theatre (246 Tremont St., Boston). Shows at 7 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. For more info and tickets, visit lisalampanelli.com or ticketmaster.com.