BATS Improv is a 22-year old non-profit education and performance theatre company based out of the San Francisco and is the largest improv theatre company and school in the Bay Area. Inspired by Keith Johnstone’s Theatresports and traditional San Francisco improv, BATS explores both short and long-form improv theatre. BATS is situated at the Bayfront Theater at the historic Fort Mason Center in San Francisco and performs year round.

Since 1999, the San Francisco Comedy College (SFCC) has proved itself to be the best group and one-on-one stand up comedy training in the San Francisco Bay Area* and since 2006 the most attended** stand up school in the country. The SFCC has two on-site clubs and offers more stage time for new talent then any comedy club nationwide. Although our focus is stand up comedy, we do offer great improv classes and people tell us that we are very much like Second City in Chicago and the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York without the pesky snow or delightful odor of the Hudson or Lake Michigan. If you want to be funny or funnier, we can teach you and we're the only comedy institution in America that offers a money back guarantee that you will be funnier!!!

 The San Francisco Comedy College Clubhouse has great shows 5 nights a week.

The Purple Onion is a celebrated cellar club in the North Beach area of San Francisco, California located at 140 Columbus (between Jackson and Pacific). The club offers an intimate, 80-person setting and was a popular influence in local music and entertainment during the Beat era.  Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, Phyllis Diller (who made her stand-up debut here), the Kingston Trio, and the Smothers Brothers (who recorded their first album, Live at the Purple Onion there) all played the club in the 1950s and 1960s.  Richard Pryor has also performed at The Purple Onion.

In theater you need materials, you need collaborators, and you need a venue. The vision would never have taken shape without Stephanie's first collaborator, Peggy Howe. They started a Monday Night performance series at the Hotel Utah in 1989, moved to Morty's in North Beach the following year, then into the back room at Cafe Beano where The Marsh began presenting over 150 different performances a year. The collaboration had expanded to include the Performers, the Audience, and everyone involved in supporting the work (the Support) that goes on at a theater. In December 1992, The Marsh found its current home at 1062 Valencia, an intimate 110 seat theater. In 1996, it purchased this location, a 12,000 sq ft building, where the vision continues to evolve. How it all began. In 1989, Stephanie Weisman, the theater’s founder and artistic director, started The Marsh because she wanted a place for writers and performers like herself to easily develop their performances. It began as a Monday night performance series, just at the time when solo performance was taking off in San Francisco, and it was an immediate success. Every week, four different performers performed for fifteen minutes each at the legendary Hotel Utah, a historic drinking hole formerly frequented by gold miners and Beat poets. Competition with Monday Night Football drove The Marsh to Morty’s in North Beach, the famous sixties hang-out where Lenny Bruce and Sarah Vaughn, among others, used to perform. Then, in 1990, The Marsh moved into the back room of the now defunct Café Beano on Valencia Street (now Café Ethiopia). Within a month, it was putting on seven performances a week. The first staged workshop was Marga Gomez’s Memory Tricks, Josh Kornbluth’s Haiku Tunnel was The Marsh’s first full-length production (and first feature film!) and Charlie Varon’s initial solo piece Honest Prophets saw its debut there. After a short stint at the old Modern Times Bookstore location, in December 1992, The Marsh moved to its current home at 1062 Valencia. It rented the friendly, laid back, 112 seat theater formerly occupied by the jazz club Bajones (where, according to local lore, you could get a margarita on the rocks at six in the morning). In 1996 The Marsh purchased the whole building, gradually developing the 12,000 square foot space into a community arts center. It currently includes two theaters, a comedy club, a cafe and a youth theater. The vision continues to evolve, most recently with the opening of a new theater in the Gaia Building in Berkeley’s thriving art district and in its developing relationships with other Bay Area theaters to present Marsh productions which include the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, the Dance Palace in Point Reyes, and the Sonoma Community Center. So why is it called The Marsh? The name, The Marsh, a breeding ground for new performance, came out of several months Stephanie Weisman spent living in a house on stilts on the Delaware Bay. The teeming interplay of the marsh terrain and its vast fecundity seemed a perfect metaphor.

For almost 30 years the nation's best comics have appeared at the San Francisco Punch Line, the city's longest running comedy club. Stars such as Robin Williams, Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O'Donnell, Drew Carey, Chris Rock and Dana Carvey took their first comedic steps on the Punch Line stage, entertaining thousands while perfecting their craft. The Punch Line's dedication to comic tradition has earned it the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle's readers' choice award for the best comedy club. Today, the Punch Line is the only full-time comedy club in San Francisco, hosting nationally-acclaimed comics Dave Chappelle (we're his favorite comedy club, ya know!!), Margaret Cho, Bobby Slayton, Greg Giraldo, Jim Gaffigan, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Dave Attell, George Lopez, David Cross, and Greg Proops, among other bona fide and rising stars, in an intimate setting where you can enjoy them, live and up-close, the way stand-up comedy is best presented.

The Comedy Club at Castagnola’s presents veteran comics from around the country with the best up and coming talent for a hilarious 90 minute show. Our breathtaking second floor venue with floor to ceiling windows overlooks the world famous Fisherman’s Wharf and the San Francisco fishing fleet.

all shows: Two Item Minimum purchase per person. Full Dinner Menu & Bar Available

Over 18 ONLY.

Once you purchase tickets for The Comedy Club at Castagnola's - you will have a reservation. No need to make an additional reservation unless you DO NOT buy advance tickets OR, you choose to have dinner before or after the show in the main dining room.