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

Knipp's act has emerged from the dive bars and semi-underground gay clubs in the South, and he has he rapidly developed a second-tier celebrity cachet. Shirley Q. routines are now popular not only at burlesque drag revues but also at frat parties, and house-music DJs from Atlanta to San Francisco mix Shirley Q. samples into their late-night sets. The cast members of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy repeatedly dropped Shirley Q.'s catchphrase greeting, "How you durrin?" into the show, and they hired Knipp to perform at their wrap party last June. Shirley Q. Liquor versions of historic Southern college fight songs are ubiquitous on campuses like the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama. Last fall, at a University of Arkansas home basketball game, fans spontaneously burst into Shirley Q.'s campy take on the school's eighty-year-old sports anthem: "A-R-K-A-N-S-A-S/Jump around/Up and down/Shake your booty/ We got to holler for these mens."

Black activists and intellectuals have responded to Knipp's rising popularity by organizing a nationwide boycott and by hoisting Knipp up alongside Don Imus as a prime example of cruel racism masquerading as humor. But Knipp goes beyond just calling black women "nappy-headed ho's": He blackens his face and plays one onstage, or, increasingly, at private events for Deep South socialites and celebrities.

In 2005, the actress Sela Ward hired Knipp to perform at a fiftieth-birthday party she threw in New Orleans for her husband. And last year, country-music star Ronnie Dunn arranged to have Shirley Q. waiting on the tour bus after a Brooks and Dunn concert in Atlanta to surprise Dunn's wife on her birthday. "Mrs. Dunn is a big fan of mine," Knipp says. "Oooh, lawdy, we had ourselves a time."

Knipp occasionally shifts into character during interviews, especially when he gets nervous. And he gets nervous talking about hiring himself out for private events for rich people because, while he likes to defend his act by claiming that laughter is the best medicine for racial ills, he knows, deep down, that any redeeming social value in his comedy depends entirely on the intentions of his audience, and whether they're laughing with Shirley or at her.

"Wealthy white people are starting to hire me for private parties, where I play the raisin in a bowl of oatmeal," he says. "From the way they interact with me, I can see that my being there as Shirley makes them feel it's acceptable to openly mock black people in a way they otherwise would not, and that does cause me to have second thoughts. If what I'm doing is truly hurtful, then I need to stop."

Vocal critics of Knipp who are demanding he do just that -- stop -- all point to the similarities between his act and nineteenth-century minstrel shows. There may be comparison points, though not necessarily the ones Knipp's detractors imagine. Though blackface minstrelsy is today seen as an example of America's regrettable racist past, shelved in history between Klan lynchings and Jim Crow laws, minstrel shows were not purely racist. Like Knipp's routines, they veered wildly from celebratory imitation to vicious ridicule.

For his part, Knipp argues there is no difference between his donning blackface and Dave Chappelle putting on whiteface to make fun of uptight white folks, or Eddie Murphy portraying a stereotypical fat, loud, black woman in Norbit.

But there's no denying that controversy over blackface has been resurging for some time, driven by a series of ill-advised fraternity parties at Southern universities. In 2001, Auburn frat brothers wore blackface and KKK robes to a party where they simulated a lynching. And this past January, similar incidents occurred at colleges throughout the South -- some Clemson students in South Carolina hosted a "gangsta" malt-liquor-and-blackface party over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.