IN CONCERT
Lisa Lampanelli
8 p.m. Saturday, May 30. $50-$60.75 after fees. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. www.cobbenergycentre.com.
For someone who can dish it hard on stage, stand-up comic Lisa Lampanelli admits she’s a sensitive soul off stage.
If you saw her on “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2012, she offered TV viewers a broad spectrum of emotions: joy, triumph, disappointment, tears, anger and even grace. Since then, the insult comic has gone through a divorce and gastric sleeve surgery that helped her lose 100 pounds.
She returns to Atlanta for her first show in more than two years at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on Saturday, more centered and happy to be a single woman in her 50s.
Lampanelli avoids social media trolls. “I’ve been insulated the past few years,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t even bother getting annoyed or read anything on Twitter. I’d rather assume everybody loves me.”
She acknowledges the irony given her reputation on stage. But she said in those instances, it’s about context. People who attend her shows want to be roasted. And fellow comics messing with each other at a celebrity roast? It’s mutual respect, she said. In those situations, if someone is calling her old and ugly, it’s cool as long as it’s funny.
She was a working comic hitting smaller comedy clubs when the Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson hit the airwaves in 2005. Her incredibly biting but very funny jokes helped her graduate to larger venues. And she hopes to keep it that way.
“I’d rather shoot myself than go back to comedy clubs,” she said. “I told my manager if it gets to that point, I’d rather retire. I’d rather garden and go to book club and curse in front of old ladies.”
Lampanelli said her weight loss has been great for her health, not so much for her fan base. People still get confused when they see her because she looks so much different from her days when she made fun of her own weight.
“I have to work extra hard, do more interviews,” she said. Her appearance on “Celebrity Apprentice” didn’t hurt either. But she doesn’t have a regular TV show to keep her face in the spotlight.
She has moved forward since her 2014 divorce, which she said was amicable. They had become more like roommates. “I was at a point I wanted to hang with my gay friends and girlfriends more,” she said. “I married someone who wasn’t right for me. Thank God he was cool with it. I’ve met his new girlfriend. I love her.”
Lampanelli, for all her sex jokes, said she has actually been celibate for more than two years. “I’ve been going through menopause,” she said. “My sex drive has plummeted. This is the perfect time for me not to be dating. I couldn’t care less!”
Her next TV special will be on Epix, a relatively new pay cable network, on June 26. “They’re really getting known for stand-up comedy,” she said, noting fellow comics Jim Breuer, Sherri Shepherd and Jim Norton have also aired specials on the network. “They pay pretty well and they can handle my hardcore stuff,” she said, without complaint or editing.
And while she doesn’t have deep ties to Atlanta, she did meet Tyler Perry years back at a Canyon Ranch resort. She told him she was a fan and what she did for a living. He said to give him a DVD so he might consider her for a TV show or movie. “I never heard back from him,” she said. “The first black joke probably got him!”
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