Blog | Victorian Chick Ventures (Considerably) East of the 405: A Perfect Night at Fig and Olive and the Hollywood Improv

The Hollywood Improv is my favorite LA comedy club, but traffic being what it is, you have either to go at 3:30 PM and kill time somewhere with your computer (which not too many married or employed people can do), or be prepared to sit in traffic for well over an hour from the Palisades.

If you are leaving after 3:30 PM, do not under any circumstances try Sunset.You have to go over 26th Street to Olympic and take your chances up to La Cienega and then up to Melrose. (Actually, with "school row," you have to stay off Sunset from Cliffwood to the 405 from 2PM on).

The 405 has become for Palisadians the equivalent of the DMZ. My parents' beautiful, elegant neighbor in her early 60s no longer eats dinner on weekdays at Napa Grille, her (understandably) favorite restaurant in WLA, because she will not sit in traffic for an hour to go to dinner in Westwood.

But twice in a month, I've made the Long March to WeHo to see the consummate Jay Mohr at the Improv for his bi-weekly Tuesday night show, the second of which featured the spectacular native Ohioan Jason Lawhead, with whom I chatted afterwards and whom I will go see whenever he's performing in town a day I'm here.

The first time, traffic was hell and I arrived too late for dinner on Melrose. I took the bartender's advice and ordered the special shrimp and mango salad which was decent. As comedy clubs and cabarets go, the food at the Improv is pretty good, though the menu is short on healthy choices. The nachos, for instance, are fattening but quite good. 

Still, West Hollywood is part of LA most like Manhattan, though Downtown has come up a lot and is no longer a ghost town at night and on weekends when offices are closed. Nowhere in WLA do you feel the urban energy you do in WeHo, and thoroughfares like Fountain feature older buildings with character, along with newer ones without the nouveau-riche tackiness of much modern development even at the high end. In short, there's history in WeHo, something absent in so much of suburban LA.

Melrose offers a bewildering array of new and old eateries, most of which I haven't tried. But I've been venturing inland more and more, in part for Fig and Olive, with which I fell in love in NYC. The original location on the Upper East Side is literally a block from the apartment I live three months a year and their 29 dollar prix-fixe brunch with three courses remains my favorite such brunch in LA.

To start, I recommend either the zucchini carpaccio with pine nuts or the signature Fig and Olive manchego salad. For the main course, I recommend the truffle fontina eggs or the simply sublime smoked salmon marinated in citrus juices with poached eggs in a bread bowl. It comes a small salad and perhaps the best rosemary roasted potatoes I've ever eaten and excellent goat cheese atop ripe, flavorful avocado slices on the side.

Fig and Olive offers a dinner prix fixe which, given the quantity and quality of food, is a good deal at 49, but still more than most people want to pay on a regular basis for dinner. You can, however, eat reasonably if you stay with the magical crostini (3 for 11 or 6 for 20) and a side of vegetables (try artichoke if you just want one, or you can sample three for 17).

The crostini and vegetables pair nicely with the priciest of the Tempranillo (16/glass) or the Grenache blend for 13/glass. Because the price for wines by the glass are the same as in NYC--where food is roughly equivalent at the comparable level except in this one infuriating way--I recommend getting a bottle of either to share. I love the people who work at Fig and Olive and you simply don't find better service in LA. My (beautiful) young server didn't miss a step and she was right about that artichoke side.

After my meal, I drove a few blocks to the Improv for a show I enjoyed even more than the one two weeks earlier, at which Jerry Seinfeld made a surprise performance. It's better to see comedy during the week because only real comedy lovers go out to shows during the week. (My friends who love baseball say the same thing about weeknight games.)

Mohr is of course a fine actor but he was a comedian first and just two weeks later, a substantial portion of the material was new. The core of the show (to which he hilariously and self-consciously returns, as in "tag that and we'll come back around") is about marriage.

Mohr's theory that common hatreds rather than common loves and shared interests are the key to marital bliss (which he enjoys in spite of having, he says, nothing in common with his wife nor liking the same things, excluding of course their darling young children) is just as funny the second time around. Every divorced person I've run this by laughed riotously in recognition of what really is true but not often articulated. This is often true of the best comedy, as Pope recognized some three hundred years ago in his canonical “Essay on Criticism,” in which he defined wit as that which has “oft been thought” but “ne'er so well expres'd.”

The new material about his children is slightly wicked and certainly irreverent but largely true. He says kids, even extremely bright ones like his older son, are idiots. He thinks it's a stupid waste of money to take kids under ten on nice vacations as they either remember nothing or remember something utterly trivial and meaningless, like the unusual toilet or trash can! He tells a great story about his son bottle feeding the baby giraffe at the LA Zoo, to which he had a special "in" which allowed him privileged access along the lines of elite patrons at art museums who are granted special viewings when the museum is closed to the public.

As someone who, for the sake of a boyfriend she loves and wishes to accommodate, endures those ghastly crime forensics shows, I literally cried laughing at Mohr's accurate characterization of the victims.

Take two of the rock legends stretch of the show was equally funny. Keith Richards gets the Mohr treatment, along with Bono (who apparently reduced African debt by something like a third) and Eddie Vedder. The Pearl Jam frontman's “no ads” stance (of which I was unaware) is extremely pretentious, along the lines of Michael Stipe's environmental activism which Denis Leary viciously mocked two decades ago (this year!) in his classic No Cure for Cancer.

Jason Lawhead was a perfect opener as much of his material falls under the rubric of “domestic” comedy. As the youngest of seven from a Catholic family in Cleveland, he has an apt and funny take on attitudes toward family size in moneyed LA. (Incidentally, why is it that so many brilliant comedians were raised Catholic whether they remain so in adulthood or not: Denis Leary, Adam Ferrara, Lenny Clarke to name a few?) I also laughed nonstop at his extended bit about the Olympics and Michael Phelps.

Standup comedy tends to be un-PC and often quite racy. But people are too easily offended in our culture and standup in my view provides a meaningful and worthwhile corrective. 

It's easy to stay in the Palisades/Brentwood bubble, particularly since you don't have to go inland for spectacular food, but it's so much fun to feel like you're in a real city without flying to Manhattan and the Hollywood Improv and Fig and Olive make for the perfect night out.