With her soft, deliberate and flawless diction, Rita Rudner sounds like she should be talking about tonight's lineup on PBS or which color scheme you should employ in your home office space. Instead, she has made a living coolly mocking the institutions we hold most dear -- love, marriage, family -- and comparing single men to "bears with furniture." Rudner's comedy is so sharp and deftly executed that it's easy to forget that her earliest aspirations were to be a professional dancer or a star of Broadway musicals. But when the comedy explosion of the late 1970s and early '80s started to detonate, Rudner noticed that the gender ratio of stars heavily tilted toward the men. So she tried her hand at stand-up and found she had a real knack for the trade. Thanks to regular appearances on "The Tonight Show" and "Late Night With David Letterman," Rudner's comedy act became an American staple. And unlike many of her contemporaries, she has pretty much stuck with it, rather than pursuing a plethora of film and sitcom roles. Since 2001, however, she has been largely based in Las Vegas, where her show has emerged one of the city's longest-running and most lucrative comedy acts. She makes a rare break from Sin City on Saturday to perform an 8 p.m. set at the Bankhead Theater in Livermore. Tickets are $20-$80; go to https://livermorearts.org/.