Gay Comedian Spoofs Non-white Women in Blackface

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."

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"Wealthy white people are starting to hire me for private parties, where I play the raisin in a bowl of oatmeal. 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."----Charles Knipp a.k.a. Shirley Q. Liquor

Related:

Wikipedia: Chuck Knipp
Rebuttal by Jasmyne cannick
Wikipedia: The History of Blackface