The Improv is a comedy club franchise. Originally, it was a single venue founded in 1963 by Budd Friedman and located in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City on West 44th near the SE corner of 9th Ave. A second location was opened in 1974 at 8162 Melrose Avenue in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, California (the old location of the Ash Grove). The LA Improv was the original site for the A&E Network television series An Evening at the Improv, which ran from 1982 until 1996, and was produced by Larry O'Daly, Created by Larry O'Daly and Barbara Hosie-O'Daly, with Budd Friedman as a warm-up host. Other locations have opened since then, such as in Tampa, Florida,Fort Lauderdale, Florida,Atlantic City, and Louisville, Kentucky.Levity Entertainment Group is the largest shareholder of The Improv comedy clubs.

The Improv was the place to see Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Steve Landesberg, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Jay Leno, and others when they were just starting out. Dustin Hoffman played piano there. On any given night in the later 1970s, one could see Gilbert Gottfried, Joe Piscopo, Bruce Mahler, Mark Schiff, Larry David, and many others. Often famous comedians would walk in to "work out" before appearances on The Tonight Show. It was not unusual to find celebrities in the audience.

Norman Gene "Norm" Macdonald (born October 17, 1963) is a Canadian stand-up comedian, writer, producer and actor. He is best known for his five seasons as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, which included anchoring Weekend Update for three years. Early in his career, he wrote for the sitcom Roseanne and made appearances on shows including The Drew Carey Show and NewsRadio. He also starred in The Norm Show from 1999 to 2001. Comedy Central named him #83 on the five-part miniseries 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. He is noted as one of Conan O'Brien's favorite and most frequent guests on his various talk shows. His brother is Canadian journalist Neil Macdonald, of CBC News' Washington, D.C. bureau.

Starting February 26, 2011, Macdonald became the new host of High Stakes Poker on Game Show Network. He also hosted Sports Show with Norm Macdonald on Comedy Central, which began airing on April 12, 2011. It was announced on June 7, 2011, that the Sports Show would not be renewed for a second season, reportedly due to low ratings, even though Sports Show steadily averaged one-million viewers per episode.

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in. Her career has spanned television, comedy recordings, Broadway, and motion pictures, enjoying acclaimed success in each medium. She has won many awards including Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award and has also been nominated for an Academy Award. Tomlin's humor is often sharp and insightful in the traditions of standup comedians, but also frequently endearing, slightly wacky, and generally quite "family friendly" in the tradition of television comediennes such as Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Eve Arden.

Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae (née Ford), a housewife and nurse's aide, and Guy Tomlin, a factory worker. Tomlin's parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. She is a 1957 graduate of Cass Technical High School. Tomlin attended Wayne State University, where her interest in the theater and performing arts began. After college, Tomlin began doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and later in New York City. Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965.

Jeff Dunham (born April 18, 1962) is an American ventriloquist and stand-up comedian who has also appeared on numerous television shows, including Late Show with David Letterman, Comedy Central Presents, The Tonight Show and Sonny With a Chance. He has four specials that run on Comedy Central: Jeff Dunham: Arguing with Myself, Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity, Jeff Dunham's Very Special Christmas Special, and Jeff Dunham: Controlled Chaos. Dunham also starred in The Jeff Dunham Show, a series on the network in 2009. His style has been described as "a dressed-down, more digestible version of Don Rickles with multiple personality disorder". Describing his characters, Time observes, "All of them are politically incorrect, gratuitously insulting and ill tempered." Dunham has been credited with reviving ventriloquism, and doing more to promote the art form than anyone since Edgar Bergen.

Dunham has been called "America's favorite comedian" by Slate.com, and according to the concert industry publication Pollstar, he is the top-grossing standup act in North America, and is among the most successful acts in Europe as well. As of November 2009, he has sold over four million DVDs, an additional $7 million in merchandise sales, and received more than 350 million hits on YouTube as of October 2009 (his introduction of Achmed the Dead Terrorist in Spark of Insanity was ranked as the ninth most watched YouTube video at the time).A Very Special Christmas Special was the most-watched telecast in Comedy Central history, with its DVD going quadruple platinum (selling over 400,000) in its first two weeks.Forbes.com ranked Dunham as the third highest-paid comedian in the United States behind Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, and reported that he was one of the highest-earning comics from June 2008 to June 2009, earning approximately $30 million during that period.

George Corley Wallace (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was an American politician and the 45th governor of Alabama, having served four nonconsecutive terms: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987. After four runs for U.S. president (three as a Democrat and one on the American Independent Party ticket), he earned the title, "the most influential loser" in 20th-century U.S. politics, according to biographers Dan T. Carter and Stephan Lesher.

A 1972 assassination attempt left Wallace paralyzed, and he used a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. He is remembered for his Southern populist andsegregationist attitudes during the desegregation period, convictions that he renounced later in life. Wallace said that he did not wish to meet his Maker with unforgiven sin.

The first of four children, Wallace was born in Clio in Barbour County in southeastern Alabama, to George Corley Wallace, Sr., and the former Mozell Smith. He was the third of four generations to bear the name "George Wallace," but as neither parent liked the designation "Junior", he was called "George C." to distinguish him from his father, George, and his grandfather, a physician. Wallace's father had left college to pursue a life of farming when prices were high during World War I; Mozell had to sell their farmland to pay existing mortgages when George, Sr., died in 1937. Like his parents, Wallace was a Methodist.