Advertisement
>>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.' "
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
Many of the students who sing Shirley's songs may not realize a blackface performer recorded them. A lot of Knipp's casual fans outside gay culture mistakenly assume that Shirley Q. Liquor really is a black woman eagerly offering her "ignunt-ass" opinions. What that says about modern-day racism in the South, Knipp would rather not care to speculate. While Shirley is coarse and boisterous, Knipp when he's playing himself is delicately mannered and reluctant to reflect upon the implications of Shirley's rising popularity or the corresponding uproar.
"Gosh, you know, if I have to explain to people what my show is about at its deepest levels, it kind of takes the fun out of it," he says. "I do see that Shirley Q. Liquor unleashes a lot of important emotions and issues around race, but I'll be damned if I can get a grasp on it. I wish God would clue me in on where I am supposed to go with her."
Knipp routinely sells out small venues in the South, and Shirley Q. is a huge draw at Southern Decadence, the annual "Gay Mardi Gras" bacchanalia in New Orleans. "My core audience is gay men, their moms and rednecks," he says.
He is paid between $4,000 and $7,000 per gig, depending on how far he must travel from Lexington, Kentucky, where he moved after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his beachfront apartment in Mississippi. Knipp's cat Rebel miraculously survived.
Despite his appearance fees and Shirley Q. merchandise sales, Knipp claims his annual take is "about on par" with the money he made as a traveling registered nurse, around $70,000 to $90,000 a year.
At some of Knipp's shows, he provides his own warm-up act by portraying Betty Butterfield, a pill-addled Southern white lady who discusses her never-ending quest to find the religion that's just right for her, and the travails of life with her abusive, double-amputee, Vietnam-vet husband, Jerry. However, Betty doesn't have the same crossover appeal, and Knipp owes his success, and the corresponding firestorm, to Miss Liquor.
Raised a Presbyterian, Knipp is now an ordained Quaker deacon. Critics who assume he's a hateful racist might be surprised to learn that Knipp is one of only a handful of chaplains in the South willing to preside over same-sex marriages. "Most of my clients are black lesbians in the Mississippi Delta who can't find a church to give them an official ceremony, so we go to a beach or park, and I'm happy to do it for them."
If there's a contradiction in marrying black lesbians by day, then performing racial comedy in blackface by night, Knipp's blind to it. In fact, he feels that on both accounts he's doing God's work.
"There are so many pent-up things that black people want to say to white people and vice versa, but we're all scared to death of offending each other," he says. "I think God's plan for me is to get right in the middle of all the tension and just make them laugh and say, 'Oh, my God, I've thought that, but nobody's ever said it out loud.' There's gotta be some healing that comes from that. And I truly think that's why God put me here: to be a healer."
That," says lecia brooks, "is bullshit. You're going to heal racial wounds by ridiculing poor black women and calling it God's will? What arrogance!" Brooks, the education director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, helped organize the protest against Knipp's Montgomery show.
"I was incensed to see all these white folks nonchalantly giggling at a white man in blackface drag," says Brooks, who is black and a lesbian. "It's amazing to me that even the rampant homophobia in the South doesn't put a dent in the sense of racial privilege presumed by the white gay men who patronize this clear example of racism and misogyny disguised as entertainment."
Like most of the protesters at Knipp's performances, Brooks admits she's never actually seen Knipp do his thing. But she's never been to a Klan cross-burning either, and she's still pretty sure she's not down with the Klan: "I don't need to see his show because I have lived it. I have witnessed every vile, demeaning, dehumanizing stereotype he draws upon to create his caricature. Blackface is not acceptable, period."
>>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.