Don't Get Me Started by Kate Clinton, New York: Ballantine Books, 1998, 199 pages, cloth, $22

I caught Kate Clinton's act in Miami—at a Lambda Book Awards soiree. "The Lion shall lie down with the Lambee," she quipped, referring to the name of the Oscar-like Lambda award proffered. I thought how Camille Paglia had once denounced Kate as "unfunny." But Camille, who only laughs with people who think she herself is the Queen Bee, was, as usual, wrong. Kate Clinton, pesky, perky and unrepentant, was clearly the show's best treat.

Melissa Etheridge says of her, "Kate Clinton cracks me up." In fact, I've realized, Kate wakes me up. Coming out of left field as she does, she opens windows on surprising horizons . About lesbians having babies, for example, she shows how this phenomenon might indicate that old-fashioned self-hates caused by anti-gay bigot-big mouths are now on the wane. Paraphrasing Paul Anka's silliest song she blurts: "Having my baby what a wonderful way to say I love me."

"Let's get one thing straight," she begins, "I'm out and proud. When I'm out and it's raining I carry an umbrella. I used to be in but I hate the smell of mothballs. My closet was huge, complete with foyer, turnstile, a few locks, dead bolts, and a burglar alarm that had to be deactivated before I could even touch the door handle. And then there was the storm door. It wasn't until I'd lived and slept with a woman for a year that it occurred to me to ask, 'Do you think we're lesbians?' By the way, don't ever come out to your father in a moving vehicle."

Kate, says Rosie O'Donnell, reminds her of "every mouthy Catholic girl" she ever knew in high school… "you know, the one who got you in trouble for making you laugh during study hall." Rosie exults, "Thank heaven Kate did get started. She makes the world a funnier place."

Don't Get Me Started isn't a terribly lengthy book, but its chock full of memorable one-and two-liners, most of which evoke big smiles and guffaws. Though comedy is said to be the other face of tragedy, there's little about Kate Clinton that evokes the tragic. Instead, she's impish. Even when her topics wax heavy, they fly light.

Kate's recollections of her Irish Catholic upbringing give a leprechaun's touches to her repertoire of stories. A Jesuit college student in the late Sixties, she describes herself in those years as "cautious, conservative, pre-Michael J. Fox." The job options for women in those days, she recalls, were nursing and teaching. Since she didn't "do" bodily functions, she explains, she decided to teach English.

Her stand up routines in front of classes led to a writing workshop and to taking an improvisational course. It wasn't until 1981,however, that an emboldened Kate Clinton emerged on stage for the first time, adopting what she now refers to as her "professional stand up career."

Don't Get Me Started is divided into a series of chapters all of which are word-plays on the name Kate: AdjudiKate. AdvoKate, alloKate, alterKate, eduKate, loKate, domestiKate, etc. The book is dedicated to Kate's lover, another woman whom I admire, Urvashi Vaid. "East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet," said the mistaken Rudyard Kipling. Ms Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and now a policy executive for that organization, has roots in India. Irish-America Meets Krishnaland in Lesbian Lore. So--go refigure, Rudyard.

"Generally," writes the comedienne, an element of pathos in her humor, "I never tell my friends when I am going to be on TV. After all, many of the shows have a special warm-up person who teaches the audience how to clap. Chest-high and twice as fast as normal. Even though I have mixed feelings—shame and guilt--about talk shows, I do them because a young lesbian activist once told me that she was home from college on Christmas break, severely depressed, isolated, and alienated. She said if she could have gotten off the couch, she would have killed herself. As she was channel surfing, she saw me on the Maury Povitch Show and paused. She said she laughed at my Connie Chung line and for the first time thought she might be gay. You never know when a comic delivers."

That's why its time to get started reading Don't Get Me Started.