As the “Queen of Clean,” comedienne Chonda Pierce performs at places where the strongest drink on the menu is coffee.

As a famous funnyman who never met a four-letter word he didn’t like, Dave Chappelle packs NBA arenas like FedExForum, where it’s obvious many of his fans have inhaled.

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Chappelle played Memphis last January with Chris Rock, and Pierce is booked for Nov. 16 at Bartlett’s Ellendale Baptist Church, seating capacity 1,400.

Chappelle is a 50-year-old Muslim who will, quite literally, say anything about anyone.

Pierce is a 63-year-old southern preacher’s daughter who, as much as she reveres Chappelle’s talent, wishes he and other comedians wouldn’t use all those “dirty words.”

So, no, they don’t have a lot in common. But this they do share:

A zero-tolerance policy toward political correctness and a dedication to using their comedic platforms to make larger points.

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It’s why Pierce says if she were a history teacher, she’d devote more time to, say, George Carlin, and less time to George Washington.

“I would play more comedians in my class than I would those little slides that bored all the kids to death,” she says. “Just listen to what the comics are saying, then you can follow what’s really going on in the culture.”

‘He still has millions’

When The Daily Memphian recently spoke with Pierce, she did not hide her feelings when learning that the person asking her questions had attended the recent Chappelle show here.

“I am so jealous!”

Quick bit of comic trivia: One of Chris Rock’s main writers, Jon Macks, also has written for Pierce.

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Small, and funny, world.

Meantime, any successful comic understands a few basic tenets: Material is everywhere, humor is power and if people are really that ticked off at you, they’ll just quit buying tickets.

Chappelle took some fire in 2021 for comments about transgender people in a Netflix special. The network stood by him and Saturday Night Live even had him host a show amid the controversy.

Pierce, speaking to The Christian Post during that time frame, said: “I’m not politically correct. I’ve been crafting a long letter to Dave Chappelle because I want to tell him welcome to the family.”

She told The Daily Memphian she has “paid a price” for her PC violations, adding with a laugh: “It’s harder for me. When he pays a price, he still has millions.

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“There are about 10 churches that won’t have me. And my manager fusses at me all the time, ‘It’s a political climate, you can’t get political.’

“My market is so much smaller, so I am going to pay the price. But at the same time, I can’t apologize for it.

“I’ve had a few Democrats walk out, so I’m like, ‘Bye,’ because I pick on them terribly. But I don’t care, it’s my show.”

Finding her funny bone

“I grew up a preacher’s kid, which would explain the leather pants.”

Pierce mostly grew up in South Carolina. The family then moving to Ashland City, Tennessee, about 25 miles northwest of Nashville, and that’s where she graduated from high school.

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Years before the leather pants, there was the issue of her skirts.

“I had little old ladies measuring the hem of my dress and fussing about my brother’s hair, if it would bounce on his collar,” she says of her upbringing in the church. “Those little old ladies are now part of my material.”

Although she would go on to do theater at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville — aiming for the “funny” roles — she first discovered the power of a good laugh when she was a kid.

“Like right before my mother gave me a spanking, if I could make her laugh” it wouldn’t hurt so much, she says.

Call it the first lesson in the importance of knowing her audience.

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Her mother and preacher-father divorced when she was in her late teens. Not long before, she lost one sister in a car wreck and another to leukemia.

It is through the lens of those tragedies, and her own battle with depression, that she looks back to the paying gig she got at 23 impersonating Minnie Pearl at Nashville’s Opryland Theme Park.

Pierce did it for six years and found it to be nothing less than a divine appointment.

“Isn’t it funny that God found me a job where five times a day, six days a week, I had to make people laugh?” she says now. “That was so powerful that He did that, that I wanted to tell about it.”

‘You have to say it’

Make no mistake, Chonda Pierce is in ministry.

She just so happens to have a microphone, a stage, a bunch of movie and TV credits by her name, including her latest film, “Roll With It,” which she wrote with her late husband David. She stars in the movie, playing a Biscuit Barrel waitress facing foreclosure.

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Now in her 32nd year doing standup, she discovered a massive audience for her craft at women’s faith conferences, and many of the fans from those days remain loyal.

“We’ve sort of grown up together,” Pierce says. “You get into menopause, and you use it. I have just as many women come to a concert to cry as to laugh. Women will laugh, pee in their pants, then cry and laugh again, and that’s what we love.

“Mr. President, sometimes you make it really hard for we conservatives to stand up for you.”

Chonda Pierce

“When I became radically in love with Jesus, it affected my entire being,” she says. “And part of that was, I can use this comedy thing to tell my testimony.

“I stand by the Bible, as old-fashioned as it sounds. You don’t want to pound it over somebody’s head, but when someone asks you, and you have a microphone in your hand, and you have an audience you think is willing to listen, and if you think that maybe what you would say would make a difference, then you have to say it.”

Chad Stewart, a worship leader at Ellendale Baptist Church, says booking Pierce, much like previously booking Christian singer/songwriter Matthew West, just made sense.

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“She’s quite a draw,” he says. “She uses her platform for ministry and some of the best medicine is humor, right? Get people outside of whatever they’re going through at the moment.”

Stewart concedes it is possible that Pierce might push a boundary and offend someone, but he also recognizes another truth:

“There’s a lot of times people are looking to be offended.

“Comedy is supposed to be thought-provoking.”

Ticking off everybody

Pierce, while snorting like a pig, on women who have husbands with sleep apnea: “You don’t know whether to call 9-1-1 or look for the will.”

Because she has been at this so long, family stories often show up in her act.

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“It’s still my M.O.,” she says. “At some point in the night, we will go by what God is doing in my life at the present time and sometimes it’s not so cheerful. When my husband died, that was hard.

“He was so much of my material! My mother was so much of my material! I’ve outlived everybody!

“That was terrible,” she says in the next breath, ever the comic with a conscience. “But that was funny.”

What some audiences didn’t find so funny in 2016: Her then-very-pro Donald Trump stance. Over the years, her feelings have changed, and she says that she once told him to his face:

“Mr. President, sometimes you make it really hard for we conservatives to stand up for you.”

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She laughs, continues, “And he just chuckled and patted me. He’s so divisive, so narcissistic. But I don’t know of a President that has sat in the oval office that doesn’t have a little bit of narcissism, that spirit of control … that’s what got him into the oval office.

“But as time went on and the tweets and the things he’d say … as a Christian it was harder and harder to stand by and not be critical.

“And then when I was critical,” she says, bringing the circle all the way around, “you would have a ton of Christians that would hate you for being critical.”

Still going strong

Pierce on her online dating experience, including being advised to tell men in her profile that she does yoga three times a week: “If this leg ever ends up behind this head, that’s not a position, that’s an accident.”

Although she has gone so far as to mention impending retirement while on stage, she’s not thinking that way now. Rather, she believes this is the time to work smarter, to not be on the road as much.

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“I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long,” she says, speaking more of her critics than the physical toll of being a stand-up comedian rolling down the road in the “tin can” that is her bus.

“I’ve gotten kicked off Facebook a few times here and there, but nothing giant,” she says. “I still sell tickets. I’m still blessed to have a job.

“(God) convicts me when I cross the line,” she adds, “and I’ll just think, ‘maybe I won’t tell it like that anymore.’”

But on the best of nights, the nights when she’s winning the laughs but knows she didn’t cross the line?

It doesn’t get any better. Because then the little girl who used to make her mother laugh to take the sting out of a spanking, the young woman who came through her grief by impersonating Minnie Pearl for six years, imagines a scene above the stage …

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A scene above the clouds …

A scene where Jesus is sitting on the edge of heaven, his feet dangling, playfully punching the disciples and rejoicing:

“Look at them, they are having a rip-roaring time in my house.”