It used to be just physical. Julia Louis-Dreyfus dancing in a Mexican party dress and yapping like a Chihuahua onstage with Chicago’s Practical Theatre Company circa 1982. Or JLD as Elaine on Seinfeld a decade later, shoving George Costanza or making that manipulative, verge-of-crying frowny face, the one Lucille Ball relied on when she had some ’splaining to do.

But there’s another weapon in Louis-Dreyfus’s comedic arsenal, and she’s brought it to bear as Vice President Selina Meyer in two seasons of HBO’s Veep, easily the funniest and least dignified TV show ever set in Washington, D.C. That weapon is rage. Narcissistic, possibly sociopathic rage. The kind of rage that wouldn’t be funny if we didn’t know it was safe to love her.

“When you lose your moral center, it’s easy to get pissed off,” says Louis-Dreyfus, sipping tea at an L.A. hotel before a script meeting for season three, which premiered on April 6. “Selina has been eaten by the machine, but also, she is the machine. She’s a mangled, bloodied, pulpy working mess.”

Here she is in season one, scolding an aide for using a White House lackey to gather intelligence: “That’s like trying to use a croissant as a fuckin’ dildo!” Delivered more softly, the line could be funny in a Tina Fey-on-30 Rock way. But here it’s just nasty, and it’s followed by a louder, crueler expulsion of wrath: “Let me be more clear.

It doesn’t do the job, and it makes a FUCKING MESS!”

Louis-Dreyfus swears that Selina’s anger isn’t fueled by her own inner demons. “I don’t have a shit-ton of baggage,” she says. “There’s not some grotesque, dark thing.”

Maybe that’s why she leaps so deftly back to the physical side. For every toxic flame she expectorates, Selina can be seen walking into a plate-glass door or giddy from pain meds, holding her hands to her chin as if they’re mouse paws and begging her assistant to watch “how tiny I can make myself.” The nuclear force of her mood swings is disorienting at first. But then you realize that her anger is just comedy turned outside in. She might be a dragon lady in Prada and Dior, but her ham-handed side makes everything okay. It makes the rage, as Vice President Selina Meyer might say, TOTALLY FUCKING HILARIOUS!