Her new special, and its press notes, focus on her recent hundred-pound weight loss and new makeover. Consequently, her many attempts at pointing out the achievement of her conventionally attractive appearance throughout Back to the Drawing Board gives her nowhere to go after she makes homophobic slurs or berates audience members with her racist jokes. She simply comes off as unlikable.

Back to the Drawing Board is repellent because Lampanelli elevates a kind of narcissism that was not previously common in her comedy while she puts others down. Between her racist jokes, Lampanelli inflates her own ego, weightloss achievement, and an incident in which she led a counter-protest against the Westboro Baptist Church outside of the venue at one of her shows, simply as ways of making herself look good, thereby placing herself above her audience and the people she insults in her routine. Her inability to include the self-deprecation that used to be part of her humor shows that comedians must places themselves on an equal playing field with their audience and their subject matter in order to be likeable and relatable, which are two qualities Lampanelli lacks in her newest special. Skip it.