Comedians: Barnyard Girl

Comedians often specialize. Some toy with national politics, others with the race problem. Rusty Warren’s field is sexual intercourse.

A squarely constructed redheaded woman in her middle 30s, with the hoarse voice and hearty manner of a call-house madam, she talks about sex in clear, unsubtle terms. Her joke vocabulary is full of colons and ova. She discusses sexual failures, makes fun of women with abnormally small chest development, and moves from person to person in her audiences making clever references to the probable size of their genitalia. Some of her words are pretty old Collegiate Gothic, like horny and poontang. And she is billed as The Knockers Up Girl.

In short, she is just another dirty comedian who deprives sex of all its grace and sophistication, while she claims to be helping inhibited females to enjoy themselves. Maybe she is. For the incredible thing about Rusty Warren is the crowds she draws. She has just left Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago, where Greyhound buses arrived every day from assorted plains cities full of jolly, plump, greying matrons dying to see their goddess. Car pools came in from Iowa and far Missouri. “The women are usually 40 to 50 or more, and hefty.” she says.

Many women regularly bring their husbands to hear her, blue-suit and brown-shoe types that have never seen a nightclub. Like Rusty, they all seem at home in a barnyard. They sit there and roar happily as Rusty expresses her desire to become the first woman to make love to an astronaut in space. The women fans wear Knockers Up buttons. They know her five LP albums by heart (more than 3,000,000 sold so far). They have made her a $5,000-a-week nightclub star, outdrawing Mort Sahl and Shelley Herman. After all, Rusty comes of a fine background. She is from Milton, Mass. She has a degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, and she once played the piano under the direction of Arthur Fiedler.