A Short History of Lipps Comedy Club
The improv venue that was also an after-hours tweaker dance club
Phillips Hotel in the 1960s, via Mark Erickson.
Today’s post is pulling double-duty. I’m putting it up here, because I’ve always wanted to write about this sliver of San Francisco history. And it will also be posted to the San Francisco Bay Area Comedy Amuseum, an ongoing historical project launched by comedian and improviser Jeannene Hansen.
The heyday of Lipps as a comedy club (201 9th St.) was roughly 1984-86, and unlike other comedy clubs in the city, which featured mostly stand-up, this venue was exclusively for improv and sketch groups. One of the weekly newspapers even ran a cover story about a new magical house of improv comedy, happening four nights a week in the basement of a South of Market nightclub. The group Faultline owned Thursdays and Saturdays, the National Theatre of the Deranged had Friday nights, and a group I was in, Stage Left, got Wednesdays. It was a fantastic little community, and most of us knew each other.
Lipps was not a theater, more of a brick-walled basement with tables and chairs. The top floor was an SRO hotel called the Phillips. Its neon sign once illuminated “Phillips Hotel,” but some of it stopped working, only the LIPS was still glowing, so people added a “p”and started calling it Lipps. There was a bar and restaurant on the main floor, with a kitchen staff operating to an internal frequency only they knew, and a separate bar downstairs. The stage was tiny, the backstage even smaller. And after the improv shows finished, Lipps turned into the Lipps Underground, or the Sub Club, or Underground SF. It had a bunch of names.
I had been to the local comedy clubs: the Punch Line, Cobb’s, The Other Cafe, Holy City Zoo—launching pads of the city’s first surge of comedians, many of whom went onto fame and fortune, like Paula Poundstone, Dana Carvey, Robin Williams, Sue Murphy, Bobcat Goldthwait, A. Whitney Brown, and Kevin Pollack. But that was the late 70s and early 80s, when comics pushed up the sleeves of their sportcoats, and rumor had it, were often paid in cocaine.
By 1984, when the Deranged moved into Lipps, it was an unusual choice of neighborhood. This was South of Market, still a pretty sketchy industrial zone with warehouses and gas stations, and dingy bars left over from the gay leather scene.
Audiences coming to see a Lipps show were not greeted by brass and wood, like the Punch Line, or a hippie vibe with picture windows, like The Other Cafe. You entered into a dimly lit bar, decorated with old TV sets, flickering god knows what, and creepy faceless mannequins wrapped with neon tubing. Entrance to the basement was down a tiny circular staircase, and if you were handicapped, just forget it. There was no elevator.
Image via Kimber Patterson.
As with any club, there was a lot of folklore. The building dated back to 1907, constructed after the earthquake, and boxer Jack Dempsey apparently had trained in the basement. The club owner, a mustachioed guy named Michael, supposedly had enjoyed a previous career as a gun-runner in Southeast Asia. Somebody once found a dead girl in the bathroom, a not uncommon occurrence in 1980s San Francisco. During the shows, cockroaches would fall down from the ceiling’s exposed electrical wiring, and land in people’s drinks. Welcome to comedy.
The bar staff, and the after-hours crowd, were the cool kids. Black leather jackets, swirly sprayed-up hair, belts made out of bullets, corpse-colored lipstick, twitchy eyeballs. As soon as our shows ended, we’d gather up our props and head upstairs and see a line down the block of club rats smoking cigarettes, with that expression of anticipation: “Fuck, man, we’re ALMOST INSIDE!”
The music changed to an ear-bleeding dark industrial thump, the repetition of terrible disco, with new and improved electronic drum machines that hit you like a jackhammer. Sometimes we’d hang out afterwards in the main bar, while the sound system thundered down below. Compared to the later crowd, we were a bunch of total improv nerds, but we intermingled and got to know the bartenders and staff, and some of them would watch our shows.
Here’s who was onstage.
National Theatre of the Deranged, 1990s.
The National Theatre of the Deranged began around 1982, as a recasting of The New Committee, a reboot of the original Committee improv company (which was itself an offshoot of Second City in Chicago). Deranged director Jim Cranna had been a member of The Committee, and he created a new format for the Deranged: a satirical news program, with someone at an anchor desk hosting the show, and people slipping him post-its for the next scene, and the anchor would always say, “This just in! We take you now, to this office at San Quentin,” or wherever the scene was set. All the material was based on audience suggestions and nothing was scripted, although many scenarios would be repeated, especially if they worked. The Deranged started their Friday night run at Lipps around 1984.
Cranna was a satirical genius with years of experience, able to devise a funny twist on the darkest suggestions, and Chris Pray improvised beatnik poems, and did a spot-on William F. Buckley Jr. impression. Every member had their own roster of weird characters. Judy Nihei, Bill Bonham, Denny Delk, Michael O’Brien, Geoff Bolt, Diane Amos…Kelvin Han Yee did amazing versions of Phil Donohue and Jacques Cousteau. Ron Muriera ripped on the accordion, and occasionally busted out a hilarious Filipino psychic surgeon named Dr. Ruben Buntok. Debi Durst and Linda Hill killed me during one show, playing the psycho devotees of Charlie Manson. And of course, Erin Donovan on lights. There were always a lot of special guests. I was the musician/anchor on the night Robin Williams stepped onstage, the audience completely went bananas, and it was one of those moments when the room turned into pure electricity.
Faultline, in the basement of Lipps, photo via Sandee Oldhouse.
Faultline were the next generation, emerging out of SF State in the late 70s, and had just relaunched in 1984. They were immediately a huge success at Lipps. Faultline were less about the old-school Viola Spolin style, and identified more with improv teacher Keith Johnstone and his book Impro. They were finely tuned and very high-wire, able to improvise entire operas and hip-hop songs, and their written material leaned into high-concept pop culture: an S&M wedding with Reed Kirk Rahlmann and Sandee Oldhouse, Greg Proops as David Byrne in a Talking Heads video, Brian Lohmann’s sad-sack lounge singer Johnny Lonely. Michael McShane was devastating as a washed-up Billy Idol performing at a Reno casino. Cathy Arcolio, music by Jeff Nate Nathanson, lights by the Pat Conroy Experience—their shows were always packed out, and really fun. This might have been at a different venue, but one night I watched in awe as Proops and McShane improvised a five-act Shakespeare play based on the suggestion of “omelet.”
Stage Left, with obligatory cable-car promo shot.
Stage Left was was Travis Darcy, Adam Moes, Claire, Cary Silberman, and myself. We were younger and less experienced than the other groups. They both had the Little Man laughing-out-of-the-chair reviews in the Chronicle, and when reviewer Gerald Nachman finally came to see our show, he declined to write it up, but hey, whatever, he’s dead now. Our material made fun of yuppies and fern bars, we projected video animations, we did some musical parodies, fake TV bits, and improvised pieces. It may have been Stage Left, or another group I was in, where we came up with a scene that parodied Platoon and the other Vietnam War movies popular at the time. The scene began very realistically with sounds of helicopters, and actors in military helmets talking into radios: “Charlie’s all around us, we’re three clicks north of Checkpoint Five.” Faced with no alternative, we decided to give the enemy a “taste of Uncle Sam,” and popped out of our foxhole and started singing a corny showbiz shuffle: “You say ‘Nam, I say ‘Nom, it doesn’t really matter ‘cause they’re all Viet Cong to me, to me, to me, to me.” My friend Aida and I wrote this piece, and we thought it was amazingly astute and timely. But one night a veteran in the audience flipped out during the song and started shouting, and the club staff had to surround him and toss him out of Lipps.
In 1986 Faultline folded as a group, and The Deranged moved to the downtown Improv club. Other groups appeared here and there at Lipps, but its comedy buzz had tapered off. We were now doing Saturdays, and nobody was coming. I remember being backstage and peeking through the curtain, and there were about six people in the audience, plus a dog with a bandana around its neck, chasing a tennis ball. It was vigorously depressing. Cary Silberman was also looking through the curtain. He turned to me and said, “We should start a magazine.”
So we did. And then I started another magazine, and ended up a journalist and author. But for another ten years, I continued with National Theatre of the Deranged as the musician/host named Kenny Bunkport.
Bay Area Theatresports (BATS Improv), started in 1986 with members of Faultline, and rightfully claims title as the longest running improvisational theatre company in Northern California. Jim Cranna’s original improv class began around 1979, and is still being taught today by Michael O’Brien at San Francisco’s Fort Mason. I’ve lost touch with some of the Stage Left members, but Adam Moes (a valued reader of this Substack), now practices acupuncture on the Big Island of Hawaii. And I was honored to speak at the memorials of Deranged members Jim Cranna and Bill Bonham.
Lipps continued as a dance club for some years. In 1998 it was bought, remodeled, and turned into Asia SF, a wildly popular restaurant, bar and cabaret starring transgender women. Asia SF closed in 2024, but the building will soon see yet another life as the nightclub 201 Bodega, which opens this summer: “With a dual-entry VIP system, custom cocktails, and curated photo ops, 201 Bodega isn’t just another nightclub in San Francisco; it’s a lifestyle. Our venue speaks to the city’s heartbeat, combining sophistication with unfiltered fun.”
Guess you weren’t really running a hip club in the 80s if no one found a dead girl in your bathroom. Also: that bandana-ed dog is a devastating image, somehow worse than crickets or empty seats.
I remember one night a woman miscarried in front of the pinball machine.