Netflix’s just-arrived comedy special/quasi-documentary about one of Hollywood’s iconic comedy palaces, The Improv: 60 And Still Standing, keeps nearly all the attention where it deserves, on the comedians who’ve appeared on its stage over much of its 60 years of yuks.
The talent gets a two-tiered showcase: short sets recorded from a recent night marking the anniversary at the Improv’s West Hollywood, Calif., mothership, and even shorter bits in vintage videos from the late 1980s and early 1990s, featuring some of the iconic comedians of the past who’ve been there.
The resulting list of performers featured in 60 and Still Standing is definitely a Who’s Who of West Coast comedy, including new stuff (mostly) from Craig Robinson, Kevin Nealon, Fortune Feimster, Whitney Cummings, Bert Kreischer, and a warmly grateful Jo Koy.
Those sets of a few to several minutes each in the 80-minute film are interspersed with brief bits, on decidedly lower quality video, of icons in their slim and beautiful youth, including Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, and, painfully, the late Norm Macdonald.
Kreischer, for one, tried on some of the material he used two decades ago, before quickly noting that comedy has, ahem, changed a bit in the interim.
The show is fun mostly for a chance to see a lot of great comics doing….something. That’s always an enjoyable watch.
What’s missing, unfortunately, is any broader sense of the impact of the Improv, including its clubs and an offshoot brand that together created a national circuit for up-and-coming comics to make money. Nor is there more than passing mention of the long-running Night at the Improv TV show.
The brief appearances by Seinfeld, Silverman, Sandler, et al, are welcome callbacks, tasty comedic amuse bouches hearkening to an earlier time in the club’s celebrated history.
But that sense of history, in a special touting the long existence of the place, reaches back only to about 1988, barely halfway through. There’s nothing featuring performers from the club’s first quarter century.
Nor is there much conversation about the role and personality of Improv founder Bud Friedman, now dead, and his daughter Zoe, who now runs the operation. It would have been delightful to get a bit more commentary from the many comics who showed up for the recent taping.
Absent that, I talked with Dunham, the Texas-born ventriloquist who started performing as a child before coming to Los Angeles to break into comedy in the 1980s while making a dummy appear to talk.
“I never quite knew what Bud thought of me,” Dunham said. “From the get-go, I don’t know what he saw. Being a guy with a dummy, you didn’t want to brag about that in the comedy world. That was a battle I had to fight. I was the unloved, ugly stepchild no one wanted to claim.”
Dunham suggests he “got to the comedy game a little later” than some of the icons featured in the special’s vintage bits. They floated on loads of talent, but also good timing, to take advantage of the first big bump in public embrace of stand-up as an art form, and comedy clubs as the place to see it.
Between the dummy act and a subsidence in comedy’s rise by the start of the 1990s, Dunham’s Improv days began extremely modestly, in a Las Vegas beachhead in the Riviera hotel that Friedman had temporarily established. The club, such as it was, required a grind for its comics that was remarkable even by Vegas standards: three performances a day, seven days a week, in a room that seated no more than about 100 people.
“Bud later presented me with a cancelled (pay)check from those days,” Dunham said. “For 21 shows, it was like $521. They wouldn’t even put us up in the Riviera. We were in the Como Hotel next door.”
Dunham then took a step up, to a ballroom in Marriott Hotel just over the hill from Hollywood in Sherman Oaks that the Improv had colonized.
“It had risers, drapes,” Dunham said. “They called it the Improv, it maybe lasted three years.”
That in turn led Dunham into the growing chain of Improv clubs, and an off-shoot chain called Funny Bones. Dunham embraced the opportunity, despite the travel and modest accommodations, because he “knew it was going to be a lot of work” that would help his career and his craft.
“Growing up, I was a cute little kid with a dummy,” Dunham said. “That didn’t fly anymore; I was a grown man with a doll. What I was really learning was real standup. I had to follow guys like Seinfeld. If you’re not funny, you’re going to start feeling it big-time.”
Dunham said Bud Friedman was “always a supporter, always a fan. I was always making money.”
He spent nearly 19 years working the various Improv venues, including two comedy cruises that Friedman organized.
“It was just another stepping stone to try to achieve something bigger and better,” Dunham said. “I never saw any bad side of Bud.”
But Dunham also acknowledged that he remained a headliner on the Improv club tour for “longer than I should have been. They didn’t want to let me go.”
Eventually, by 2007 or 2008, Dunham transitioned to the much bigger arena shows that some of his colleagues had already graduated into. A family man, a Baylor University graduate, Dunham said he never really was one of comedy club dudes who would hang out long after their sets.
And he’s more than a bit grateful to have come up in the famously transgressive industry at a time when it featured fewer cultural minefields. He names two big challenges.
“The woke business of what you can joke about and what you can’t joke about,” Dunham said. “I think audiences are getting sick and tired of being told what you can’t talk about. If you’re (a comic who’s) not well known, boy. you’re setting yourself up for problems.”
As an example from his own past, Dunham said he had a character named Sweet Daddy D, modeled back then after a stereotypical black pimp.
“I did everything I could to create this character that would make fun of me, because it’s goofy to be a white guy sometimes,” Dunham said. “I used him a handful of times. There is no way in hell I could even fathom doing anything like that today. We’ve learned a lot, we’ve grown a bit. Things that were said decades ago were really bad. But you don’t know what the climate was where people were making jokes, and now society has changed.”
The other part that’s challenging for comics these days is the ease with which people can record a performance, post it on YouTube and TikTok, and use the jokes to make money for themselves.
“Nobody has the power to take it down from YouTube,” Dunham said. “How easy it is that someone can steal it. Technology, I don’t know how you deal with that.”
There’s still plenty to talk about these days, as Dunham has moved into “more relationship- and situation-driven” comedy at this stage of his career.
Last weekend, he recorded what will be his 11th comedy special, including seven for Comedy Central. It’s set to run in February. But he still has deep appreciation for his time with Improv, which, like Dunham, is still standing decades after it started.
“Nineteen years later, I can say that doing the Improv chain couldn’t be a better way to begin a career,” Dunham said. “I would not be here without the Improv.”
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