Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

The room began as a dressing room for the rock club next door. Punch Line San Francisco at 444 Battery Street in the Financial District opened around October 1978 in space attached to the Old Waldorf, the music venue whose owner Jeffrey Pollack booked everyone from U2 and Metallica to Elvis Costello - and it has outlived its parent to become San Francisco's oldest running comedy club. Founded by Pollack with Patricia Pollack and Jonathan and Anne Fox, the club sold to promoter Bill Graham in 1981 and stayed in the Bill Graham Presents family through the successor companies that eventually became Live Nation, which owns it today along with sister rooms Punch Line Sacramento and Cobb's Comedy Club in North Beach. The roll call of comics who worked out material here before fame is the club's calling card: Robin Williams, Ellen DeGeneres, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Rosie O'Donnell, Drew Carey, Patton Oswalt, Wanda Sykes and Dave Chappelle all played the room early, and many still drop in unannounced. House MC Bobby Slayton - the Pitbull of Comedy - anchored the club's first years and returns annually as a headliner. The main room holds just 182, a proximity that keeps the club on touring comics' short list for taping-week warm-ups and surprise sets; shows run six nights a week with a bar and light menu. The club nearly died in 2019 when its lease at the 1967 building ran out and closure was announced - a civic outcry followed, city supervisors moved to protect the space, and a new lease kept the stage lit; it remains the only full-time comedy club in San Francisco proper. Readers of both the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner have repeatedly voted it the city's best comedy club, a status effectively unchallenged given its solitary full-time standing - and a long way from a converted dressing room.