Getting the last laugh

Step aside, Janet Jackson and Beyonce. There’s a new diva on the dance floor — and her name is Yoko Ono.

Over the years, the widow of ex-Beatle John Lennon has received more than her fair share of ridicule for her primal-scream vocal stylings. Now, at 71, Ono is having the last laugh, thanks to a recent string of neo-disco hits.

Her latest single, “Hell in Paradise (Part One),” reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart.

Three previous dance-remix singles — “Open Your Box,” “Kiss Kiss Kiss” and “Yang Yang” — helped establish Ono as a club favorite starting three years ago.

She topped the chart last year with an EP of remixes of “Walking on Thin Ice,” the song she and Lennon recorded on the night of Dec. 8, 1980. When they came home from the studio, Lennon was shot to death by a deranged fan.

Lennon had predicted Ono would have a No. 1 smash with “Walking on Thin Ice.”

“At the time I said, ‘Oh, yeah, right,’ ” Ono says by phone from her home in New York City.

“I didn’t really believe it. A few years later, I was saying to John in my mind, ‘John, you were wrong.’ And now I have to say, ‘Well, you were right. The timing up there must be very different.’ “

“Hell in Paradise” originally appeared on Ono’s 1985 album “Starpeace.” On the new single, her quivering voice floats hypnotically above the thump-thump-thump-thump of cutting-edge electronic beats by remix specialists Orange Factory, Murk, Chus & Ceballos and Minge Binge.

“What’s uncanny is, if you look at the lyrics, you’d think they were written yesterday,” says Rob Stevens, managing director of Ono’s record label, Mind Train.

“Hell in Paradise” runs down a laundry list of timely woes: “Mesmerized by mythology/Hypnotized by ideology/Antagonized by reality/Vandalized by insanity.”

Ono “could be talking about the current administration or the current unease felt globally,” Stevens says.

Her next single, “Every Man/Every Woman,” updates “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him” from the 1980 “Double Fantasy” album by Ono and Lennon. With Ono’s blessing, the original tune has been reconfigured into two club-friendly permutations: “Every Man Has a Man Who Loves Him” and “Every Woman Has a Woman Who Loves Her.”

Several “Every Man/Every Woman” remixes are already available through iTunes, and the complete gender-bending single is due in stores in late August.

“Every Man/Every Woman” is Ono’s way of weighing in on the gay-marriage controversy. “In this world, where love is so scarce, if two people love each other so much they want to get married, we should celebrate it,” she says.

Ono says she has “no immediate plans” to give the dance-remix treatment to any of Lennon’s songs.

“It’s a very different issue,” she says. “I’d really have to think about it. Unless I did it very carefully, it’s kind of sacrilegious.”

Ono hopes to use her own newfound popularity in clubland to get as many people dancing as she can.

“I’m putting out a message: Make your heart dance every day,” she says. “And if you can’t make your heart dance because you’re too depressed, then do something to make somebody else’s heart dance. It could be something simple.”

For example, call somebody you haven’t talked to in a while — your mother, for instance, Ono suggests.

“Dancing every day, on a physical or a conceptual level, is very important,” she says. “If we can all keep dancing together, then we can get somewhere. We can create a better world by having fun and being joyful.”