Lisa Lampanelli seems to be the hot new comic on the block. Her schtick is ragging on the gays and the blacks and the jews and Mexicans and what ever other minority she has in her sights. I don't find her particularly funny not because I find ethnic humor so troubling just because she sounds an awful lot like my mother. I've heard it all before.

I grew up just outside of New York City where everybody was known for what they were. If you were Catholic, Jewish, Irish, Italian, German or Polish it was all out in the open. More likely you were a Mick or a Kraut or a Wop. Everyone traded insults equally. I heard Polack jokes for years before I had any idea what a Polack was. They were just funny, you could have been talking about a plumber as far as I was concerned. 

To my Brooklyn born Irish mother the world was divided into Catholics and everyone else and in the Catholic world it started with the Irish and worked it's way down to the Italians and Mexicans in the cellar. The sub basement was for the dirty protestants and the Jews were burning in the fiery furnaces of hell. There of course was an entire different category for the Germans. She was born in August 1914 just as the first World War was starting. Five of her uncles served in the war and she grew up thinking the Germans ate babies. Being a young wife and mother at the outbreak of World War II only reinforced that opinion. I once heard her say to a friend during a phone conversation, "Well you'd expect it from the Japs but the Germans were civilized!" and this was in the 1970's.

Black people or the coloreds as she called them when I was young inspired the most fear but they were also the people we had the least contact with. In the 1960's she and my father constantly spoke about this demon named Adam Clayton Powell, the congressman who represented Harlem in Washington. I had no idea why they disliked him so much. As I got older I realized that they resented Powell's outspoken nature in representing his people. She exhibited the same resentment when black people started being seen more on TV and in movies. "Why is it every time you turn on the TV now you see one of THEM in the show?" She rarely used racial slurs but everyone was labeled. This jew or that colored or that Puerto Rican. It went on to the end of her life.

Lisa Lampanelli is just bringing back the bad old days. Younger people must find it shocking and daring to have someone say such derogatory things about minorities in these politically correct times. Maybe if she could be a little more clever in her delivery, throw in a couple of Polack jokes. It's too bad my mother has been dead all these years. I'd send Lisa for a few lessons from a real master.