Lisa Lampanelli, who does some of the meanest comedy in the biz, brings it.

Comedian Lisa Lampanelli bills herself as the Lovable Queen of Mean. She’s been dishing it out on comedy stages for more than 25 years, most famously on Friar’s Club and Comedy Central celebrity roasts. She is a gladiator armed with offensive material.

At a roast of Larry the Cable Guy, she began by strafing the celebs on the stage.

On Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady: “I read your autobiography. You were more unstable than Robert Reed’s t-cell count.”

Reed, who played the father on The Brady Bunch, died of cancer exacerbated by HIV. When the audience ooohs, Lampanelli whines, “Oh, too soon?”

She gets to former defensive lineman Warren Sapp, who is black.

“Warren, you’re so hot if I owned you I would let you in the house.”

Everyone, Sapp included, laughs. Lampanelli does throwback jokes. She awkwardly drops “black” slang and slings racist jokes, she calls Mexican-looking male audience members Jose, she does gay jokes, Asian jokes, Arab, fat, etc. It’s some of the basest comedy around, delivered with loud, brash, Italian energy.

But on the phone from her home in Connecticut, she is earnest and thoughtful. She attended short graduate programs at Harvard, Yale and Columbia. She was a journalist. She supports rescue animals and LGBT issues.

How does she reconcile all this?

“It sounds annoying, but I don’t think you can do that kind of comedy if you’re not born kind of unprejudiced and nice and generous. Like [Don] Rickles. There’s just certain types of people who can say things and get away with them and people know they’re joking. I’m lucky enough to have whatever that thing is.”

Context goes a long way.

She’s said that if anyone detected a hint of real venom in her jokes, she would get rejected. Like Michael Richards, aka Kramer on Seinfeld, and his lynching “joke” to a black heckler. It seems power and privilege play a part – that the comedian is down with, or is a member of, or is not more powerful than, the afflicted. Louis CK breaks this down eloquently:

“I’m a white man. You can’t even hurt my feelings.” He pouts: “‘He called me a cracker, bringing me back to the days of owning land and people.’”

Lampanelli says she cracks on minorities and marginalized people because she feels like she’s an ally.

“I’ve always felt I didn’t fit in anywhere,” she says. “I identified with people who [felt] different. My support [of Gay Men’s Health Crisis] started when I protested Westboro Baptist Church.”

She was overweight since college, a 32-year struggle she recently remedied with stomach bypass surgery, shedding 100 pounds. She also shed her husband of four years and much of her offstage anger. She picked up yoga and spiritual practice, and refreshed her look.

She says she’s still “gangster” in her comedy – a previous tour promised she was Leaner and Meaner – but her evolution has carried her beyond just its sting.

“I started opening up more onstage,” she says. “I talked about the operation, the weight, the divorce, about what’s really going on in my life – which I love.”

Her last comedy special was called Back to the Drawing Board, in recognition of all the starting over. She’s working on a theater piece called Fat Girl Interrupted, a revealing look at her real life. Her comedy approach seemed to be “the best defense is a good offense.” But it was also cathartic.

She still likes Mexican – and woman-bashing Donald Trump, who she’s roasted and appeared with on The Apprentice. Lampanelli herself got in trouble in 2013 for Tweeting “Me with my nigga @LenaDunham of @HBOGirls – I love this beyotch!!”

For that she got backlash, the kind reserved for white people feeling privileged enough to appropriate minority culture in inappropriate ways. Kirsten West Savali in theHuffington Post’s BlackVoices blog called her out soundly:

“White women don’t get to sit in their Ivory Towers and tell black people how we should feel about bastardized language historically spewed to demean us.”

It takes guts to get on stage and dare to make an audience laugh. But it seems a gift to give them real insight in addition to laughs, which the best comedy often does.

Does offensive comedy combat real offenses? Or does it reinforce hurtful stereotypes? Lampanelli acknowledges the pain behind comedy.

“I think it’s healing. If you talk about a death, divorce, rape, AIDS or cancer, it’s like ‘Wow, I’m not alone.’ Comedians have to hold up the mirror to society.”

What does her mirror say? You can see for yourself. Consider yourself warned.

LISA LAMPANELLI 8pm Friday at Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $33.50-$63.50. 649-1070, www.GoldenStateTheatre.com