Test Your Grasp of Vulgarity with Our Totally Offensive Lisa Lampanelli Quiz! |
Comedy's Lovable Queen of Mean has earned a reputation as a celebrity-roast regular and the top female insult comic working today. See if you can pick out which bons mots are genuine Lisa Lampanelli lambasts.
1. There's a fine line between stupidity, and, well ... you.
|
2. Once you go black, you're gonna use your crack! Once you go Hispanic, mom and dad start to panic! Once you go 'Rican, a job you'll be seekin'!
3. I like gay guys. Gay guys make a fat girl feel like she has friends.
4. This kitchen smells like Italian—mozzarella, fake gold and huge, greasy hair.
5. How to be a better Asian: Watch every race of man sleep with your women, while only Asian women and ugly white women will sleep with you.
6. If I have to bang every type of group that I make fun of, my vagina would just fall off, okay?
ANSWERS:
2, 3, 5 and 6 are Lampanelli zingers.
Here, in the Waning Days of Literacy, a Book You Should Read |
All Things, All At Once: New and Selected Stories
Lee K. Abbott
W.W. Norton, $26.95
In the last two decades, as short stories have disappeared almost entirely from glossy magazines, it's become hard to find writers who will take risks with them the way writers like Harold Brodkey once did.
Happily, Lee K. Abbott is willing to claim that mantle of gassy experimentation. In six previous collections, the New Mexico-based writer has stuffed as many semicolons as he could fit into a sentence, strapped them to no-luck narrators and explored what happens when you add a little whiskey.
Abbott has now gathered together the best of those previous efforts with some new stories. If tidy fiction is your thing, you might want to pass this one by, because Abbott has a yen for drunks and divorces, for men with logorrhea and a barely concealed sentimental streak.
About the only thing that will get the attention of Abbott's characters is a gun, because many of them are moping their way into middle-age, with a slapstick understanding of their failings but a lazy inability to do anything about them. Abbott's one mistake is that he seems to think this is charming. It's not, but it's indelibly human—and that's what makes these stories worth reading.
DVDs |
Neil Young: Heart of Gold (4 stars)
$29.99
In 1984, Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense effectively set the standard by which all future concert movies would be judged. Martin Scorsese had already raised the bar with The Last Waltz, but, unlike the Band, the Talking Heads hadn't announced their retirement and the group wouldn't be joined onstage by dozens of the biggest names in rock and blues. Neither had Neil Young, when, in 2005, Demme set about to document his two-night stand at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. The concerts not only would kick off the campaign for Young's mellow and reflective Prairie Wind album, but they also represented his return from the brink of tragedy after surgery for a brain aneurysm. Just as Demme was able to infuse Stop Making Sense with a palpable surge of electricity, Heart of Gold radiates the kind of warmth and wisdom that comes from age and experience. Plenty of extras, too.
Charlie Chan Collection, Vol. 1 (3 stars)
$59.98
What could be less PC than spending an afternoon watching a bunch of movies extolling the investigative talents of Honolulu police detective Charlie Chan. (Okay, following it up with an Amos & Andy marathon, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.) Fox had restored the movies included in the box—Charlie Chan in London, Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan in Egypt, Charlie Chan in Shanghai and the Spanish-language Eran Trece—for its Fox Movie Network, but it caved in the wake of protests from Asian-American groups. The racial stereotyping and casting of a non-Asian actor (Warner Oland, a Swede) in the title role clearly are indefensible, but Chan is a benign presence. Onscreen portrayals of Native Americans, Arabs and undocumented workers from Mexico have been infinitely more despicable and damaging, but no one's in any rush to eliminate them from cable TV. The bonus featurettes put the series in its proper context, adding needed perspective on Hollywood's frequent flirtations with racism.