Shirley Q. Liquor: The Most Dangerous Comedian in America
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.’ “
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 on stage, 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.”