Lisa Lampanelli zings Westboro; Harold Camping gets it wrong again

Last Friday, I wrote here about how insult comic and “queen of mean” Lisa Lampanelli would be performing at the Topeka, Kansas Performing Arts Center, and how Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church loonies had announced they would protest outside the center because Lampanelli is pro-LGBT. So then Lampanelli announced she would donate $1,000 for every protester who showed to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an AIDS/HIV service organization in New York.

The Phelps clan did show up outside the Performing Arts Center, and Lampanelli’s people counted 44 of them. But the Westboro bunch claimed there were 48 protesters, so Lampanelli decided to donate $50,000. She is supposed to go to GMHC tomorrow (Wednesday) to present them with a check.

Below is an interview with Lampanelli published online today by The Village Voice in which she explains what led up to the situation in Topeka and how she even took her audience outside during the performance there to make fun of the Westboro protesters, including getting a gay couple to make out in front of them. Here’s video from the Village Voice website:

On her decision to donate $50,000, Lampanelli told Village Voice: “My driver counted 44 people, but the next day, somebody from those assholes said they had 48. I’m not going to quibble, so I said, ‘Let’s make it an even 50 grand.’ And if they don’t like that, they can suck my dick.”

I say let’s hear it for Lisa Lampanelli: Hip-hip huzzah! (Ok, so I spent too much time at Scarborough Faire this spring!)

And now to update another of my blog posts from last week: On Wednesday, May 18, I posted this blog about 89-year-old Oakland, Calif., preacher Harold Camping who had researched his Bible and done some holy math and discovered that the Rapture would occur at 6 p.m. local time (as my friend Haley said, it was apparently going to be a rolling Rapture, since we have so many time zones and therefore so many 6 p.m. local times), on Saturday, May 21. Camping also said that the world would end completely on Oct. 21.

Well, 6 p.m. May 21 rolled around — in all time zones — and no Rapture. Except now Camping is claiming the Rapture actually did happen, but it was a spiritual rapture and not a physical rapture so nobody actually noticed. “Spiritually, there is a big difference in the world that we can detect with our eyes,” Camping told BBC in the video below, but make no mistake about it: The world is under judgment and the end is definitely coming.

And Camping still insists the world will end on Oct. 21.

I’m not holding my breath.