Comedian banned in Boston!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 26th, 2008

There’s an article from the Washington Post, authored by Neely Tucker, which appeared in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer that talks about blackface. (And, oddly, doesn’t mention Sarah Silverman!)

We’re not sure it’s worth reading the whole thing, as it contains sentences like this:

Since we’re all supposedly postracial, some white comedians think it’s allowable to use makeup to portray black characters with empathy or just for laughs.

Allowable? We wonder to whom comedians are expected to apply for permission to do certain things. Is there an official Board of Questionable Taste?

Though the burnt cork and garish lipstick seem consigned to the bin of bad taste, there are different levels of subtlety in whites playing black dress-up. Maybe it’s becoming possible in an era when interracial friendships and romance exist much more freely for whites to do impersonations of black characters well and affectionately, and vice versa. Billy Crystal’s take on Sammy Davis Jr. on Saturday Night Live several years ago was spot on, but Crystal was gifted enough to make it more about celebrity and friendship than about race. It had the critical assets of being (a) funny and (b) not at all caustic.

Ah! We’re getting a clearer picture now. It must be funny! That clears things up. And it must be below a certain level on the “caustic” scale. Perhaps the Board of Questionable Taste will set aside Mondays to Relative Funniness and Causticity Determination Day. Submit your sketch scripts early, as there may be some suggested changes.

Sentences such as this:

Goofy can work, although it’s tricky. The rule is that the joke has to be on the white character, not the black one.

Rules? It gives us the heebie jeebies. The article’s full of such ridiculous pronouncements.

There’s a reference early on in the piece to “Chuck Knipp (who) does drag as a black Southern woman, Shirley Q. Liquor, the “Queen of Ignunce,” in clubs and on video-sharing sites.” Then later, there’s this:

The new spin: White actors play characters so hip they can say whatever black people do, and it’s OK because nobody would ever think they’re racist, get it? This is apparently what Knipp is trying to get at in his portrayals of Shirley Q. Liquor. His character has 19 “chirrun” and is on welfare and talks about “labesians” and “homosexicals.” It’s like Daddy Rice and Jim Crow brought back from the grave. Rolling Stone called Knipp “America’s most appalling comedian” last year.

Jabari Asim, author of “The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why,” says comedians like Knipp prove society is just not that far along.

“We all wonder what it would be like to walk in someone else’s skin,” says Asim (a former Washington Post editor now at Crisis magazine). “But to put it out there in public, or in a feature film, is a combination of [boldness] and stupidity.”

Don’t you just love the title of Asim’s book? We’re certain that it’s supposed to merely provocative (we hope!), but it’s still rather… authoritarian.

We were utterly unfamiliar with Knipp, we decided to Google him to see what all the fuss was about. From what we can tell, he’s some sort of a performance artist who does several characters, the most popular of which is Shirley Q. Liquor, “a cariacature of a black southern woman” featuring Knipp in blackface.

His Wikipedia entry says Knipp is “a citizen of both the United States and Canada, active in the ACLU and Libertarian Party and was nominated as their candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000.”

It gets better: Knipp, it seems, performs mostly for gay male audiences.

Performances by Knipp have been canceled in West Hollywood and in Hartford, CT. And, “an appearance in Boston which was scheduled for October 18 was cancelled by order of Jerome Smith, acting as agent for Boston mayor Tom Menino.” He was actually banned in Boston! In this century!

He is often greeted by protestors and, just last year, he was the object of at least one campaign by a “gay rights activist” named Jasmyne Cannick, the goal of which was “encouraging nightclub owners to cancel Knipp’s act.”

Of course, as so often happens with such efforts, it brought even more notoriety to Knipp and his alter ego Liquor.

His characters, his performances are wildly popular with gay, male (and, we assume, gay, male, black) audiences. But his notoriety (indeed, his very existence) has engendered much intense criticism, pitting gay rights activists against Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, drawing the ire of BET commentators and gay non-profits whille gaining effusive support from Ru Paul. He’s been defended by the Southern Poverty Law Center but condemned by GLAAD.

The tempest surrounding Knipp illsutrates one thing: Comics can and should do pretty much whatever they want.

And the amount of support Knipp has (and the diverse crew that lends such support in the face of the vehement criticism he’s received) should render the above cited article by Neely Tucker (and the bleating from assorted academics and busybodies) totally impotent and ultimately irrelevant.

Tip of the hat to sharp-eyed reader Terry Reilly!