Shirley Q. Liquor is a fat black woman played for laughs by Charles Knipp, a gay white man. He performs his one-man show mainly in gay bars throughout the American South. He is also on radio and the Internet.

Shirley Q. Liquor has has 19 children, speaks bad English, drinks malt liquor, drives a Cadillac and lives off government benefits. She has daughters with names like Chlamydia and Kmartina.

It is all a stereotype about black women: the welfare queen. It pictures black women as having little intelligence, money or willingness to work hard.

Knipp is doing what is known as blackface. Since the early 1800s whites have been painting their faces black and playing black people for laughs. I thought this stuff died out in the 1960s along with Jim Crow. Apparently not.

Protesters were able to shut down some performances in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, but as of 2008 Shirley Q. Liquor is still alive and well in the gay bars of the South. Knipp has been doing the Liquor character for about ten years.

Jasmyne Cannick, Bev Smith and others are sickened by what Knipp is doing. Cannick is trying to shut him down for good. She has an online petition to sign.

Cannick says that Knipp puts down black women.

But Knipp says he honours them, that black people are “more than intelligent enough to discern the nuance,” that many of them like his show.

One of them is RuPaul, a gay black man. He says this:

Critics who think that Shirley Q. Liquor is offensive are idiots. Listen, I’ve been discriminated against by everybody in the world: gay people, black people, whatever. I know discrimination, I know racism, I know it very intimately. She’s not racist, and if she were, she wouldn’t be on my new CD.

I am one of those idiots who missed the subtle nuance. I did not see anything to laugh at. Knipp is tasteless and mean-spirited.

Yet I loved Madea, a big black woman played by Tyler Perry. He is a straight black man.

So is that it? Are those who do not laugh at Liquor the true racists?

No. Imagine if Tyler Perry played Shirley Q. Liquor the way Knipp has. We would still be asked to laugh at black women as having little education or money, as speaking bad English and not working hard.

Most black women are not like that. For them it is a put down - one of many, so it is not a matter of “lightening up”. And for those black women who do have little money or education, it is just plain mean to make them a laughingstock because of it.

That is bad enough. But knowing that Knipp is white makes it that much worse. The humour is no longer just mean but racist too.

He would have never done this to his own mother. Or the Jews.

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