Las Vegas Sun interview. “Knockers up, so to speak, and a new phrase was born.”
By 1960s standards, Warren’s material was too racy to score her any radio play or television bookings. Instead, she toured the country playing nightclubs and recording comedy albums, the kind that got played at backyard parties after the kids went to bed.
“Today, Rusty Warren routines sound regressive and the opposite of female-empowered,” says historian Tam Fiegel, who’s preparing a biography of Warren she plans to submit to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. “But in the early 60s, a woman talking about sex was a woman taking a place of power.”
Rusty Warren, Brash Comic in a Strait-Laced Time, Dies at 91
In the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Warren made sex the central subject of her nightclub routines, and of popular comedy albums like “Knockers Up!”
In nightclubs and on records, Rusty Warren entertained audiences with a lusty, bawdy brand of humor. “I like helping inhibited females enjoy themselves,” she once said.Credit.Jubilee Records
May 28, 2021, 12:18 p.m. ET
Rusty Warren started out in the early 1950s performing harmless fare in bars and clubs in the Boston area and the Catskills.
“Mostly I’d play the piano and I sang a little,” she said. “But every so often I would get a heckler, and I’d talk back to him, and people would start to laugh. And of course I liked that laughter much better than I did some of that applause, so I started to talk more, and to sing and to play less.”