Lisa Lampanelli,  Born July 19, 1961

Lisa Lampanelli was born in Trumbull, Connecticut and grew up in a household of five with her parents and two siblings.  Her father was of Italian descent, and worked as a contractor for Sikorsky Aircrafts before retiring early to pursue a career as a painter.  Lampanelli says that her comic inspiration came from her mother, who she describes as a “genteel and often clueless bigot.”  To illustrate, back in 2009 Mrs. Lampanelli was asked if she wanted Lisa to remarry (she is divorced), and her reply was, “Yes, of course…as long as he’s white”.  Growing up, she attended several Catholic schools in Connecticut, and after high school Lisa went on to Syracuse University to study journalism.  She then went through a graduate program at Harvard, and worked for several high profile magazines - she was a copy editor for Popular Mechanics, and an assistant at Rolling Stone, where she “interviewed those fuckin hair bands like Cinderella and Slaughter.”  Lampanelli also once studied at Columbia University with the hopes of becoming a teacher.  She even did some student teaching at a school in Harlem for a short period of time, despite the fact that she hated kids.  One day while driving home, Lisa heard an ad on the radio seeking “party D.J.’s” and decided to give it a try.  After a brief stint on the turntables, she began attending a comedy class and soon found herself on stage during an open mic night.  As Lisa puts it, “It went so well that I called in sick the next day to my job, and never came back.” 

Lisa Lampanelli’s raunchy, take no prisoners style of comedy is a relatively new angle for female-stand ups; as she once put it, “I am not going to be an awful female comic doing typical material about dating and shopping and PMS.  I want people to know that when they see me, it’s going to be really hardcore and edgy.”  Lisa broke into the mainstream in 2002 when she was picked as the only female comedian at Chevy Chase’s New York Friar’s Club Roast.  After her performance, she became a regular on the Comedy Central roasts - to date, Lampanelli has been roaster for Denis Leary, Pamela Anderson, Jeff Foxworthy, Flavor Flav, William Shatner, and served as the Roastmaster for Larry the Cable Guy.  She also released her first full-length DVD comedy special in 2002, titled The Queen of Mean, which established Lisa as one of the rising stars in stand-up.  Since that time, she has released three other DVD’s - Take it Like a Man, Dirty Girl (which earned her a Grammy nomination in 2008 for Best Comedy Album), and her first HBO special, Long Live the Queen.  As for her other achievements, Lampanelli has had bit acting parts in a couple of god awful movies – namely Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector - is a regular on The Howard Stern Show, and was connected with several potential TV sitcoms over the past few years - unfortunately, none of them ever recieved the green light for production.  She also dipped her pen into HarperCollins’s company ink in the form of her 2009 memoir, Chocolate, Please: My Adventures in Food, Fat, and Freaks.  A writer for The Washington Post once did an article on Lampanelli’s newfound success, and one passage in particular describes why she was a shoe-in for The Hater Hall of Fame:

“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.  And people love her for it.”  

Lampanelli sets her sights on a former Baywatch beauty – a more current and fitting title is probably a Hepatitis honey (all videos contain language):

 A clip from Take it Like a Man (click red button, close pop-up, hit green play button):

Lisa thanks all the people she made fun of, and then makes fun of them some more: