Opposite Ends of the Comedy Spectrum, Pt. 1

Saturday evening, Caesar and I rode the Passport to Downtown Long Beach for a quick dinner at The Pike. I actually convinced him that we needed to be in the area as early as possible to make sure we didn't miss the show. Unfortunately, we arrived too early and by the time we finished eating, we still had an hour and a half to kill so we wandered through Borders then down toward the fast-spinning ferris wheel.We bypassed that, deciding instead to wander through the Romero Britto art installation.

Britto's 6-foot-tall pieces were set in the grass patches in front of the Laugh Factory. A bit odd to see right along the Shoreline Drive, but passersby stopped to look, take a picture or two with the large objects. I wondered if the lone security guard stayed through until morning. Leaving those out all night in one of the unrulier night spots in Long Beach didn't seem like a good idea. "Probably they work in shifts," Caesar said.

We left the art installation, crossed Shoreline to take in the view of the harbor, then sauntered across one of the bridges to the Performing Arts Center for the main event: Lisa Lampanelli.

For those not in the know, Ms. Lampanelli is known as the "Queen of Mean" and deservedly so. She's an insult comic who leaves no person unscathed, flinging the raunchiest, most un-PC remarks about blacks, Asians, HIspanics, gays, lesbians, straights, whomever lands in her crosshairs.

And for Saturday's performance, she was on a roll. From the beginning, when she came on stage only to find a group of four people in the front row who couldn't find their seats, she let the cannons loose, pounding the stairs into the audience while the insults about the group of four flew left and right. The audience loved it -- and so did those four. She touched on every racial stereotype imaginable, and everyone laughed -- not just polite laughs, but the kind that rock you forward in your seat, hand clamped over your mouth, not believing what just spewed from the stage but unable to stop laughing. I sat there thinking how wrong it was, but when the Latino couple next to me was laughing at the exact same joke about hispanics that I was, or when Caesar and I howled at the gay references ("Once you go fag, your shoes match your bag!"), I never for once thought she was being racist. Rude: yes. Crude: yes. Overtly sexual: most definitely. Yet we all laughed, enjoyed being able to let ourselves go.

During the bus ride back, filled with mostly those of us who had just seen the show, none of us could stop smiling or thinking about what a great time we had.