The improv venue
that was also an after-hours tweaker dance club

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 Philips. Its neon sign once illuminated “Philips 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. 

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.