Shirley Q. Liquor, After Imus: A Black Face Comic Who Sings "12 Days of Kwanzaa"

>>LISTEN: Check out a remix of RuPaul's "Supermodel" featuring Shirley Q. Liquor.

>> This is an excerpt from the new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands until June 1st.

Backstage at a gay bar in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, on the same block as the fountain square where slaves were sold, sits America's most appalling comedian. He's a fat, gay forty-five-year-old white man, a part-time nurse, who lives alone with two cats and who believes he's on a mission from God. Once a month, Chuck Knipp (pronounced with a hard K, like "Knievel") transforms himself into a living taboo. First, he puts on a giant housedress and a pink, curly wig. Then he smears his doughy face and neck with chocolate-brown foundation, rainbow-hued eye shadow and garish red lipstick. When he's finished, staring back at Knipp from the mirror is the blackface mask of a modern-day minstrel, and the character known to Knipp's legions of cult followers as Shirley Q. Liquor, a welfare mother with nineteen kids who guzzles malt liquor, drives a Caddy and says in an "ignunt" Gulf Coast black dialect, "I'm gonna burn me up some chitlins and put some ketchup on there and aks Jesus to forgive my sins." Shirley also shops at "Kmark," eats "Egg McMuffmans," visits her "gynechiatrist" and just loves "homosexicals."

"She's a lady who doesn't give a damn," Knipp says. "She just raises her kids and watches her stories and hangs out with her best friend, Watusi."

Outside the nightclub, a score of protesters, both black and white, line the sidewalk across the street from the Rosa Parks Museum, waving signs that declare NO MINSTREL SHOWS! and BLACKFACE ISN'T FUNNY!

Inside, a full house of mostly gay white men erupts in laughter as Shirley struggles to remember the names of her "chirrun," in one of Knipp's most popular routines, "Who Is My Baby Daddy?" (They include Cheeto, Orangello and Kmartina.) Later, Shirley warbles "The Twelve Days of Kwanzaa" to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas": "On the fifth day of Kwanzaa, my check came in the mail/AFDC!/Thank you, lawd!/Come on, kids/Let's go to the store/For some collard greens, ham hocks and cheese!"

With such material, it's no wonder Knipp is vilified, or that angry protesters are a fixture outside his shows. But not all his routines are so crass. In her own bug-eyed fashion, Shirley Q. invites audiences to empathize with a poverty-stricken black single mother's daily struggles with police who arrest her for "driving while black," clerks who wrongly accuse her of shoplifting and coldhearted bureaucrats who shut off her electricity.

"Baby, we was extremely povertied this week," Shirley Q. announces. "My check had not came on time. Oooh, we was stretchin' it, honey. I aks them to keep my power on. I said, 'A woman have got to have some fans runnin' down here in this heat.' "