Irvine Improv marks 40 years of comedy gold, from rising comics to legends
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The Irvine Improv turns 40 this year, a milestone birthday that always offers a chance for self-reflection.
Erin von Schonfeldt, the club’s chief programming officer, started off in Irvine as a cocktail waitress in 1991. Two years later, she was married at the venue.
Along the way, there have been decades of memories. Her favorite was when Louie Anderson was performing at the Irvine Improv in the mid-1990s, and von Schonfeldt received a call from actor-comedian Robin Williams.
Williams was at Disneyland with his family, and he wanted to perform the late set that night. After checking with Anderson —- who was cool with it as long as Williams went on after him — von Schonfeldt called Williams back to deliver the good news.
“My favorite part of the story was Louis gets on stage and absolutely brings the house down for an hour,” said von Schonfeldt, who lives in Huntington Beach. “It just absolutely destroys. Everyone’s having the best time, and then at the end of his set, he says, ‘Hey, you guys have been such a great audience, and I hope that you’ll indulge a friend of mine by sticking around for a little while. Please welcome to the stage Robin Williams.’
“The audience is silent because they think he’s completely full of it. And then from the back of the room where I was standing, the people could see Robin,” she continued.
“You’d hear those rows that see him just start to erupt, and then the next rows that see him start to erupt, and then finally the whole room is losing their marbles. I mean, that memory still gives me goosebumps. Those are the moments that cannot be replicated because it’s just such a huge surprise, and the energy was ridiculous.”
The Irvine Improv started out at the Irvine Marketplace, across the street from UC Irvine. In 1999, the comedy club became a tenant at the Irvine Spectrum Center.
“It’s time for us to grow up and turn the club into something we know it can be,” Robert Hartmann told the Los Angeles Times at the time.
Hartmann, the founder and senior partner of current Improv management company Levity Live, had been hired at the Irvine Improv as a bartender’s assistant in the 1980s and worked his way up.
He said this week that it was an exciting time for stand-up comedy, when HBO started airing it on television.
“Man, it exploded after that,” Hartmann said. “And obviously, the ‘Tonight Show’ always gave us a platform, and that was a prime driver of success for young comics, unknown comics thinking to make their first ‘Tonight Show’ appearance, that was the rocket fuel at the time. But then, when pay-per-view and HBO took over, getting your first HBO special, man, you became a star overnight. That’s what really was rocket fuel for us in the ‘80s and going into the ‘90s.”
Hartmann said over the years, nearly every comic played Irvine. Chris Rock would headline there as he was trying to work more traditionally white clubs.
“He knew how to make Black people laugh,” Hartmann said. “He wanted to know how to cross over more effectively, so he just worked mainly white rooms to develop ‘Bigger and Blacker,’ his breakout special. And you know, he spent many weeks working Irvine.”
Another favorite memory was when Tim Allen was pitching his 1990s sitcom “Home Improvement” to ABC executives, and chose to move south from Los Angeles to do his performance.
“He brought them all down to Irvine, because he didn’t want a jaded audience,” Hartmann recalled. “He wanted more of a reflective audience of America rather than an L.A. audience.”
The Irvine Improv moved locations within the Spectrum in 2014 to the former food court space, tripling in size.
As far as the comedy goes, von Schonfeldt said that the Irvine location is her favorite Improv to book.
“Because the audiences are just so consistent, and we’ve been in the market for so long with such a great reputation, it gives me the freedom to book the top tier big marquee names,” she said. “But, it also gives me the opportunity to give emerging artists an opportunity. I can get those new voices that I find at the Hollywood Improv or at the Brooklyn Improv or or the Milwaukee Improv. You know, I’m watching every show every night, even if it’s on my computer.
“I can find those voices, and I know the first place I can put them where they’ll do well is Irvine. It’s just a special market.”
Hartmann said he’s more optimistic about the future of stand-up comedy than ever, because it can offer once-in-a-lifetime experiences in a shifting world.
“When you have Ian Bagg talking to the audience and 90% of his act is around crowd work, that only happens once ever, and then it’s gone,” Hartmann said. “So with those shared experiences in the room, I think comedy and the live entertainment aspect is going to be more valuable to the human connection than anything else.
“We’re going to be moving into this new world order of how AI is going to impact our lives, and I think it’s going to disconnect us even more. We need live venues, we need live music, we need live comedy, we need ‘live.’ Those shared experiences are the most important aspects of being human.”
