In comedy, timing is everything. So the decision to bring Lisa Lampanelli to our province in the wake of a complaint to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal against comedian Guy Earle is truly funny. If this province can’t handle an outburst from a no-name comic in a restaurant, how on earth are we going to get through the full-on racial and sexual verbal assault that is Lisa Lampanelli in a packed theatre?

No minority is left unscathed in Lampanelli’s onslaught. Then again, people should know that going in. The self-styled Queen of Mean proved that no topic or tribe is off-limits as the go-to closer on Comedy Central’s high-profile roasts of the likes of Pamela Anderson, William Shatner, and Flavor Flav.

Lampanelli, who plays the River Rock Show Theatre on Friday (August 1), wasn’t aware of the case against Earle until the Straight filled her in during a recent interview, but she says that, in general, insults have to be funny and come from a good place.

“You have to actually try to have a point and a punchline,” she says, on the phone from her home in Connecticut. “It usually helps get you through a perceived racist remark.”

It’s no good, she says, to blame the audience if they don’t get it.

“If you have to explain that these are jokes, the jokes aren’t funny, so the audience is right to have the angry dykes come after you. Because they’re fucking angry people.”

If there’s a politically incorrect way of phrasing something, Lampanelli is all over it. And somehow she gets away with it. In our half-hour interview, she ruthlessly attacks just about everyone (including me), yet you always sense a kind of wink to let you know she’s not serious, despite the outrageous words spewing out of her mouth. Right off the top, after learning that my given name has the Anglo pronunciation, she said, “Thank God, because I’m so fucking over the French. Die of cancer, French Canadians. Put that as the headline.”

Don’t be mistaken. Lampanelli isn’t performing to some drooling mob of white devils who don’t get the shtick. She regularly performs on the Black Entertainment Television cable network in front of mostly African-American audiences. Her fans, she believes, can differentiate between actual and artificial prejudice.

“I’ve talked to real black people—believe it or not, there are real black people in this world who speak English—and they’ve said to me, ”˜Hey, if you know what’s behind it, if you know there’s warmth and no hate, we know how to take it.’ ”

When asked if she might sometimes attract the wrong kind of person to her comedy, she readily admits the possibility. “I’m sure I do,” she says. “And that’s why I make my donations to the NAACP and the Phone in the Spic Today Fund and the Save the Gerbil Foundation for the fags, because the guilt I have is assuaged when those cheques are written. What are you gonna do? You can’t worry what everybody thinks. Do you worry every time you hit your kids when everybody’s telling you you shouldn’t? No, you beat them senseless, don’t you, sir?”

After a brief career in journalism, working at Rolling Stone and Spy magazines and freelancing articles on the hair bands of the day, Lampanelli found her calling in comedy.

“You just know what’s right for you, and you know what career’s right for you,” she says. “So I knew it instantly. Just like the minute you took this job to interview celebrities for minimum wage, you said, ”˜I’m going to stick with that. Some day it’s going to pay off.’ ”

Ouch. Now that was uncalled for.