"Knockers Up!": Rusty Warren’s Comedy and the Politics of Sexual Liberation

• In Event: Stand-up Comedy in the Underground

Abstract

Known as “The Mother of the Sexual Revolution,” stand-up comedian Rusty Warren had 7 gold records and sold more than 5,000,000 albums, her material aimed at joking about sex and the experiences of the “average woman” in the 1960s. Despite her songs being banned on the radio and her comedy act rejected from mainstream talk shows like Johnny Carson’s "The Tonight Show," she had an enormous fan base, especially among women. Her most influential album "Knockers Up!" fanned the flames of women’s liberation and garnered over one million registered members of Jubilee Records’ “Knockers Up Club.” Despite her branding as a “sexual philosopher” on stage, Rusty Warren remained in the closet about her own sexuality until later in life. In the era of Betty Friedan bemoaning the threat of the lesbian “Lavender Menace” in second-wave feminism, Warren hid her queer sexuality while her act spoke to the sexual liberation of married women. Rusty Warren’s career in comedy is emblematic of the tensions between the second-wave women’s liberation movement and the gay liberation movement, representing the limits of the so-called sexual revolution.

Historically, heteropatriarchal structures also position Rusty Warren as a frivolous singer of novelty songs instead of a successful comedian. Because she wrote songs in addition to jokes, she is imagined as just a lounge act, who was not as ‘serious’ or politically impactful as someone like Billie Holiday. However, in her time, Rusty Warren was a skilled stand-up comedian on par with Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Bob Newhart, and her fellow women comics, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, and Moms Mabley, among others. Though she existed in the margins of performance genres, like other minoritarian performers she skillfully negotiated an industry that was against her, making women laugh about their position in society and their bodies. The underground circulation of her comedy records fueled women’s grounded engagements with their own bodies, the laughable parts of female sexuality, and brought to the fore the liberation of women’s bodies. At nightclubs from Ft. Lauderdale to Las Vegas, she instructed her audience to get up from their seats to follow her, “Throw your shoulders back! Get your knockers up, and put a big smile on your face! Knockers up, everybody!”

Author

• Samantha Silver, George Washington University