The Ice House, the Pasadena comedy club at 24 N. Mentor Ave., hosts a free, recurring stand-up open mic called “Breaking The Ice” in its California Room, giving new and returning comics a low-cost stage at a venue the club bills as the oldest comedy club in the country.
The open mic is one of the smaller, community-facing offerings at a club better known for touring headliners. It functions as a standing invitation to anyone in and around Pasadena to try a short set of stand-up, and it runs at a venue that reopened in 2023 after a pandemic closure and a multimillion-dollar renovation.
According to the club’s own event listings, “Breaking The Ice” is free for audiences to attend and is held in the California Room, the smaller of the club’s showrooms. Comics who want stage time sign up for a nominal fee — listed at $5 — and the club’s listings put doors at around 6 p.m. The club posts its current calendar, including which nights the open mic runs and who is hosting, on its website as dates are confirmed, and lineups and formats for its shows are noted as subject to change.
The Ice House sits at 24 N. Mentor Ave., in Pasadena’s Playhouse Village, a short walk from the Playhouse District’s theaters and restaurants. The club describes itself as the oldest comedy club in the country. It opened in 1960 under Pasadena businessman Willard Chilcott and spent its early years as a folk-music room before shifting to stand-up in the late 1970s.
The room’s current chapter began in 2019, when Johnny Buss — a son of the late Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss — bought the club. It closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and reopened in 2023 after a renovation reported by the Los Angeles Times at about $4 million, which added new showrooms, a VIP lounge, and updated bar and staging. The club has positioned itself since the reopening as a stop for both touring headliners and up-and-coming comics, and open mic nights are part of the programming aimed at newer performers.
Over the decades, the club and published histories of the venue credit its stages with hosting comedians including George Carlin, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres, among many others. The California Room open mic sits at the opposite end of that spectrum — an entry point for comics working on new material rather than a marquee booking.
Audiences and would-be performers can confirm current open mic dates, start times and hosts through the club’s published calendar. The box office can be reached at (626) 414-2386.
