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Cover image credit: Promotional image via Apple

Take It Like a Man

Lisa Lampanelli

Comedy Central · 2005 · 59 min

An hour of relentless insult comedy aimed directly at the audience.

Lisa Lampanelli treats the stand-up stage like a dais, operating as a human roast for an hour straight. The act relies on blunt insult comedy, throwing out extreme stereotypes and vulgarity under the premise of equal-opportunity aggression. She isolates specific audience members to mock their race, gender, and appearance. There is no subtle messaging at play, just a rapid-fire barrage of slurs and put-downs designed to find the line of good taste and step completely over it.

Filmed at the Improv in Hollywood, Florida, the 2005 release served as her first major hour. Lampanelli was capitalizing on the momentum of her breakout appearances on the Friars Club and Comedy Central celebrity roasts, pivoting that combative energy into a solo club act.

The set list

3 bits

  1. Lampanelli's personal dating preference for Black men

    Routinely riffs on her sexual attraction to Black men and explicit commentary on partner size.

  2. Roasting individual audience members

    Selects random male patrons in the front rows to lob tailored insults, racial jabs, and crude improvisations.

  3. White stereotypes and soccer moms

    Briefly mocks politically correct suburban soccer moms and older white men as a segue into broader racial humor.

How it plays

Tone
Crude, transgressive, ribald, and aggressively politically incorrect.
On stage
Brassy, loud, profane, and unapologetically offensive insult comic, described as a modern-day female counterpart to Don Rickles and Archie Bunker.
Pace
Rapid-fire raunch with a deadpan, fearless delivery and loose momentum, frequently digressing to spontaneous topics before circling back to crude punchlines.
About
race relations and racial stereotypes, human sexuality, dating preferences, homosexuality, audience roasting

What the critics said

Received positive notes from comedy critics for her fearless commitment to high-tempo R-rated insult comedy, though some viewers and reviewers found the relentless reliance on minority stereotypes, crude shock value, and explicit anatomical jokes repetitive over an hour.

In the room: Good-natured crowd responding with loud laughter and accepting extreme insults as willing sports.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: imdb.com, themoviedb.org, plotexplained.com, tv.apple.com, theguardian.com, dvdtalk.com, cinafilm.com, en.wikipedia.org, allmusic.com.

Backstory

Lampanelli stated that her goal was to lighten the tense national climate following 9/11 through transgressive political incorrectness and equal-opportunity insult comedy.

Details

Released
Taped
The Improv, Hollywood
Runtime
59 min
Where
Comedy Central
Director
Michael Drumm
Topics
Before
The Queen of Mean (2002)
After
Dirty Girl (2007)

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