A Quote by Lisa Lampanelli

I really think the biggest honor, as a comic, is to get roasted by either the Friars Club or the Comedy Central or someone like that. Because it really shows, you know, that you've arrived.
John Frances, Entertainment Chair, of the Friars Club: Of all the roasts that I have produced for the Friars Club, this is the one that I am most excited about. Mickey is one of the Club's dearest friends, and we wanted to honor him in the way we know best.
Being a female comic and getting a Comedy Central special is an honor because not a lot of women get that.
Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be serious, like Daniel Day-Lewis. No one really dreams of being a comic actor, do they? Now I realise how stupid that is - and it's because comic acting isn't taken seriously enough. It's a discipline. You know instantly - either you're funny and getting the laughs, or you're not.
I think of myself as a theatre comic instead of club comic because I tend to talk for a bit before I start being funny. I don't really do the one-liners and five second bits or whatever. But it's good to work stuff out sometimes.
It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.
As a former stand-up comic from my University of Michigan days, the opportunity to participate in a Friars Club roast was bucket-list stuff.
Comedy is hard to do, and I don't know why it doesn't have its own category in awards. I don't understand why people think it's harder to do drama than it is to do comedy. It doesn't get respect. It's hard. It's really hard. It would be more gratifying to get something for a comedy, because it doesn't happen much or at all.
I really like doing television shows, and I anticipated doing a comedy, because that's the place I feel the most comfortable - those are the risks I want to take. But it was always really hard for me to find a script that I really liked.
Football can change really quickly; you really are king for a day. Once you get caught up with things and think you've arrived... you've never arrived in football.
Comedy is more difficult than drama. I think it's really difficult to make someone laugh because people have very different comedic sensibilities. In drama, you can get away with being a great actor and surrounded by great actors and having good writing. But in comedy you have to listen and you have to perform with a certain rhythm, because if you don't, it's like playing a wrong note in the orchestra and you can hear the off key and it will fall flat and you won't get that instant response.
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
In North America, people get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don't know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don't know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.
A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
A roast is really an honor. If they picked me to be roasted, I'd be the most flattered I'd be in my life. If I could pick some people to roast, I'd pick my heroes, Don Rickles and Howard Stern. Those are the people I'd like to give some honor to.
It's really important that when you come to a club, you know the history. My dream was always Real Madrid or Barcelona, but for the fans of Tottenham, the club is the biggest in the world. So that's how I treated it.
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