156: Rita Rudner’s Life in Dog Years

ON THE KNOWS with Randall Kenneth Jones, the NEW Jones.Show Podcast

A house-filling favorite in Las Vegas since she opened as one of the hottest tickets in town in June 2000, Rita Rudner is known for her epigrammatic one-liners. Over the course of a multi-year run she sold almost two million tickets, grossed over a hundred million dollars and become the longest-running solo female comedy show in the history of Las Vegas. She 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.

Rita’s first solo HBO special, “Rita Rudner’s One Night Stand”, was nominated for several awards, as was her eponymous English BBC television show that later appeared in the USA on A&E. Rudner’s two one-hour specials for HBO, “Born to Be Mild” and “Married Without Children,” were ratings 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.

Rita 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.

She just released her autobiography, “My Life in Dog Years.”

Rudner is a frequent collaborator with her writer/producer husband of thirty years, Martin Bergman. The couple’s first produced film script was “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. The script was nominated for a WGA Best Screenplay Award and Rita won Best Supporting Actress at the American Comedy Awards.

Rita Rudner moved to New York at the age of fifteen to become a dancer on Broadway. She appeared in several shows, including the original productions of “Follies” and “Mack and Mabel.” It was while in “Annie” on Broadway that she began exploring the comedy clubs of Manhattan. In the early ‘80s, Rudner took a full-time leap from chorus lines to punch lines and was soon a regular guest on both Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show.

In June 2016 Rita was invited and honored to speak about her career and technique in comedy at Cambridge University, England. In 2017 she was invited by Oprah Winfrey to appear on a cruise to Alaska that Oprah did in partnership with Holland America.

In 2018, Rita’s tenth TV special was released: “A Tale Of Two Dresses.” The special also featured Rita and Martin’s singer/songwriter daughter Molly Bergman.

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Rita Rudner Online:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realritarudner Twitter: https://twitter.com/ritarudner Web: www.RitaRudner.com

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