One recent Tuesday afternoon, actress and comedienne Natasha Leggero just got through taping another episode of "Chelsea Lately," where she is a regular panelist on the show's celebrity-dish roundtable. So, what did they talk about?
"Well, Lindsay Lohan just got out of rehab yesterday and moved in right next door to [ex-girlfriend] Samantha Ronson," says Leggero, on the phone from LA. "So, we were making fun of that. And I feel Lindsay Lohan - she's going crazy. So, we just made fun of her for a while, which we do on the show a lot."
But while she may pull out the claws on celebs at Chelsea Handler's late-night gabfest, Leggero believes she's not like that when she's doing stand-up. "I'm not trying to be catty," she says. "I just like to bring to the forefront some unpleasant truths. And I don't think that that's necessarily catty. It's usually based in reality."
If Leggero, 36, does seem critical in her stand-up, that comes mostly from the degree in theater criticism she received while attending college in New York. A former child actress who appeared in plays in Chicago, not too far away from her Rockford, Ill., hometown, Leggero took her critiquing style to comedy clubs when she moved to Los Angeles.
"I just saw someone talking about LA onstage, and I was like, 'Oh, I can just get up onstage and kind of critique what I see around me and what's happening, in the same way I did with the plays in New York.' And, so, I tried it once, and it really worked, so I just kept doing it."
Leggero presents herself as a 21st century Dorothy Parker when she gets on the mike. Leggero (who looks like Bangles frontwoman Susanna Hoffs without the big Rickenbacker guitar) doles out blunt observations on everyday life and popular culture usually in a downright fetching outfit, often with matching, forearm-length gloves.
"A lot of that comes from, you know, I wasn't rich growing up. But I feel like just because you don't have money - because moving to LA, I didn't have any money; when I was in New York, I didn't have any money - it doesn't mean you can't be glamourous. It's all about creating your own glamour around you."
Leggero's comic melding of classy and coarse has landed her many TV gigs. Most recently, she was a judge on "Last Comic Standing" last season, alongside comics Andy Kindler and Greg Giraldo, who passed away in September due to an accidental overdose. In her nine years of doing comedy, Leggero says, she never had seen more people in the stand-up community saddened by the loss of a fellow comic.
"It's very sad that Greg died," says Leggero, who doesn't know exactly what the stand-up reality-show competition has planned for the future. "We all loved him very much, and he was very great to work with. ... A bunch of people were really hurt because he was such a nice person, in addition to being hilarious."
Nevertheless, Leggero is still continuing to do her thing on the stand-up stage. She'll have her own "Comedy Central Presents" special in March. (She'll be donning gloves!) She's also found a way to riff on various comedy-worthy subjects on her weekly podcast "The Lavender Hour," which she co-hosts with comedian/boyfriend Duncan Trussell.
"We kind of tried to create this thing where we can have our friends on who are funny, interesting people - not just comics - and where we can just kind of talk about anything we wanted to, regardless of whether or not someone had jokes about it or whatever," she says. "So, you can kind of go into deep waters, if we wanted to."
So, whether it's onstage or online, Natasha Leggero is showing that she doesn't just dish about celebrity trainwrecks. They're always funny to talk about, but still.
