A funny thing happened to Rita Rudner on the way to the Broadway stage. The once aspirational dancer threw in the tights, pivoted into humor, and has since become a comedic legend.
As she prepares to return to the Segerstrom stage on April 7, Rudner reflected this week on how she became funny in the first place. The outspoken comedian said, as a child, she hardly spoke at all.
“I was a reader,” said Rudner. “I didn’t talk. I was a late talker.”
Rudner was born and grew up in Miami. At 15, she graduated from high school and soon departed with a dream.
“Because I was younger than everyone else when I graduated from high school, I didn’t have a lot of people to talk to,” Rudner remembers.
Determined to become a dancer on Broadway, she moved to New York.
“I was serious about becoming a dancer, and you don’t become a dancer because you’re verbally adept,” notes Rudner. “So, I was very quiet. I was very shy. I didn’t say a word,” she said. Although she did get dancing roles in “Annie” and other productions, she began to reconsider her career decision.
“I just noticed there weren’t too many female comedians,” Rudner recalls thinking, “yet there were a lot of dancers, so why don’t I try to be a comedian?”
“Whenever I’d show up at a dancing audition, there were thousands of dancers, so I just thought my odds were better of becoming a comedian,” she added. “And then when I started going to comedy clubs and researching it, I became fascinated with it.”
In Manhattan, Rudner said she lived across the street from the Lincoln Center Library, recalling the many hours she spent in the Center’s library listening to comedy albums to learn her craft.
“I listened to many albums but liked Woody Allen the most. He was the one I could understand. And what I loved about his comedy is that you didn’t have to be a woman or a man to write it. You just had to be a person.”
Rudner said she did not necessarily set out to write comedy from a female point of view, but “it ended up from a female point of view because that is who I am.”
“I’m still fascinated to this day by how to write something funny and how to make people laugh, it was a late calling for me. It didn’t happen naturally,” said Rudner, “I had to do a lot of work.”
Rudner broke into the American mindset with a new class of comedians like Robin Williams and Stephen Fry, who themselves broke the comedic mold.
She quickly became a regular on contemporary late-night shows like “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, “Late Night with David Letterman,” and others.
“I don’t know where the humor comes from,” she said this week, “it just pops into my head, and I write it down.”
The observant Rudner has found a way to make people laugh at the oddity and humor in their own behavior. Exposing the idiosyncrasies of relationships was funny then, and now, she said.
“It still is because you know everyone can relate. And I know gay couples can relate as strongly as heterosexual couples because we’ve all experienced the same things, no matter who we are,” said Rudner.
“My life hasn’t been that funny,” she admits, “just funny enough.” During the pandemic, Rudner said he had time to complete her memoir, “My Life in Dog Years,” which will be released soon.
“I can talk about serious things,” adds Rudner, just never on stage. “I just think that people need, especially now, to escape for an hour and a half and not worry about what’s going on in the world.”
Rudner prefers creating jokes that are “carefully constructed,” working hard to determine “where it goes, how I say it in my act, how many words, where the intonation is because I would like it to be there [in my act] forever.”
While she does make notes before going on stage for 90 minutes, she never writes the entire script, only inserting new observations into an act that Rudner acknowledges “works 100 percent of the time.”
Her career highlights underscore Rudner’s ability not only to make people laugh but also to write and act. Rudner’s groundbreaking HBO comedy special, “One Night Stand” was nominated for an Emmy and other awards.
Her eponymous English BBC television show that later appeared in the USA on A&E also received nominations. Rudner’s two one-hour specials for HBO, “Born to Be Mild” and “Married Without Children”, were rating standouts and she performed all over the country, filling Carnegie Hall in New York three times.
In 2008, “Rita Rudner: Live From Las Vegas” was PBS’s first-ever stand-up comedy special.
In Vegas, throughout a 14-year run, she sold almost two million tickets, grossed over a hundred million dollars, and became the longest-running solo female comedy show in the city’s history.
Rudner was named Las Vegas’s Comedian of The Year nine years in a row and in 2006 received The Nevada Ballet’s Woman of The Year Award. In October 2017 she was given the Casino Entertainment Legend Award as Rudner has also written books, scripts, and produced.
Rudner has written five books; her bestselling non-fiction titles, “Naked Beneath My Clothes”, “Rita Rudner’s Guide to Men”, and “I Still Have It…I Just Can’t Remember Where I Put It”, plus the novels “Tickled Pink” and “Turning the Tables”. The audio version of “Naked Beneath My Clothes” received a Grammy nomination.
Rudner is a frequent collaborator with her writer/producer husband, Martin Bergman, who produced their first collaborative film script “Peter’s Friends”.
The film, starring Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Kenneth Branagh, Imelda Staunton, Stephen Fry, and Rita, won the Evening Standard Peter Sellers Award for Best British Film and was nominated for the Goya Award for Best European Film of 1994. Suffice it to say, Rudner’s show business credits are extensive.
“I figured out a way to have a life that I’m proud of,” she said, “because I have a marriage. We’ve been married for 34 years. I have a daughter, who is in college now. She is 19. And I just think I’m proud of the way I’ve managed my life and it could have gone horribly wrong being alone in New York at 15.”
Her daughter Molly now has a career of her own and attends college in Miami. Martin and Rita split their time between touring and relaxing, with homes in Vegas and Laguna Beach.
Rudner spares not the ravages of time, adding the humor of getting older in her act. “What am I going to talk about, getting younger,” she asks?
“I was a totally different kind of comedian to Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller. Every woman who becomes a comedian has to find her own voice. I follow my own voice. Roseanne follows her own voice. Joan followed her own voice. I think everyone has to blaze their own trail,” Rudner has said.
“I think Joan Rivers stayed relevant because she became topical and she always wanted to reach for a younger audience, but I’m just happy that the people who come see me want to come to see me, knowing we’re going to have a good time,” said Rudner.
“I just have a special place in my brain that I tapped into, where I learned how to do comedy,” said Rudner, “which I’m very, very happy about because I don’t think at this point, I’d have a future as a dancer.”
Segerstrom Center for the Arts presents “An Evening with Rita Rudner” on Thursday, April 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Samueli Theater. Single tickets for Rita Rudner at Segerstrom Center for the Arts start at $59 and are now available online at SCFTA.org, at the Box Office at 600 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa, or by calling (714) 556-2787.
