Rita Rudner has been firing off three jokes per minute on the Strip as a resident headliner since 2000. Photo by K.M. Cannon.

Think of Rita Rudner, and you probably think of the shopping jokes and the battle-of-the-sexes thing.

The comedian's comic persona is almost as identifiable as her distinctive voice and upscale stage attire, all of which combined to make her a Las Vegas mainstay since 2000.

"Oh, guys, you're going to learn so much about women tonight," she proclaims in her current home at Harrah's Las Vegas. Rudner became the master tenant of the 530-seat showroom last fall, after leaving a New York-New York venue that was about 100 seats smaller.

But not everything about her comedic approach is all it seems on the surface, starting with a democratic approach to the gender wars.

Though Rudner warns "Don't mess with me," her comic characters often battle to a domestic draw. In a quintessential routine about the mountain of decorator pillows covering the bed in the master bedroom, the punch line goes to her husband, who is never-named but oft-mentioned. If nobody else ever goes in there, he asks, "Who do we do the little pillow show for?"

Without explaining the "whys" of female behavior to the men in the audience, she can at least explain the "hows": "I don't know. I only know that I love my pillows and I have to do the show."

And as she tells the Universal Husband, "you can marry a different one, but she's going to do the same thing."

Beyond that important perspective, there's another way to explain the longevity of the prim comedian who has been working the Strip since 1990. In a recent interview, Rudner noted that she averages three jokes a minute, making her the rare modern comedian to fire off one-liners at such a clip.

Burning through so much material means some of it will be tailored, and some off the rack. In a bit about doctors, she says she got the flu and was told to wait three weeks for an appointment. "I'll sit in a draft and I'll try to keep it going," she replies.

Or there was the time she walked into the scary Las Vegas place with flashing lights and drugs everywhere. "Then I realized I was in Walgreens."

You can almost hear the rimshot after either of those jokes, and you could likely put them in the mouth of any comic from Jack Benny to, God help us, Larry the Cable Guy. But who would have figured that Rita and Larry have a lot in common: Outsized personas (complete with a "sound" and a "look") that makes every joke their own, and lead you to think the material is more focused than it often is.

Those who have seen the act in recent years should know much of it will be familiar. The new stuff slips in between the proven cornerstones. A classic routine about Rudner's inability to read a road map has been updated to the era of directional navigation systems. Everything was going well until the couple spontaneously decided to go to Los Angeles instead of San Diego, "and we didn't know how to tell the car."

If you want to test Rudner's comeback skills, you can try to throw her a curve ball in the question-and-answer session at the end. Good luck. She's got an answer for everything. Asked if the much-maligned husband is on site, Rudner states with that distinct lilt, "He's seen my act. He doesn't care for it."

As long as married couples don't change, Rudner probably won't have to.