Tim Allen Returns to Hometown of Denver for Standup Tour

Actor and comedian Tim Allen has been a lot of things over his decades-long career. He was one of America's favorite TV dads on the hit ’90s sitcom Home Improvement, he gave voice to Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story, and he played Santa Claus in The Santa Clause movies, of course, including the new series The Santa Clauses.

What you might not know about Allen is that he's also a Denver native.

So it will be a homecoming of sorts when Allen returns for "A Night of Comedy" at Bellco Theatre on Friday, February 2, greeting a hometown crowd and revisiting the standup and storytelling that first made him famous. The show is for ages eighteen and up (mainly, Allen says, because he swears a lot), and tickets start at $75.

Allen was born Timothy Allen Dick in 1953 in Denver. His father worked in real estate in the landmark Equitable Building at 17th and Stout streets, and Allen remembers that building as being one of the tallest in the city back then. "The city has skyrocketed now," he says. "It's so much bigger in almost every way." Allen says he reluctantly left Colorado for Michigan, because his father died young — killed by a drunk driver coming home with the family from a CU Boulder football game — and his mother eventually remarried. "I didn't want to leave then, which is probably one reason I come back so often now," he muses.

Allen says he still gets back to Colorado a few times a year to visit family and enjoy a cabin he maintains up in the mountains. But it's clear from the way he talks about his childhood in Denver that the city and his life here made its mark. "I remember the view outside my bedroom window faced west, and I could see the mountains," Allen says of his childhood home at Third Avenue and Marion Street. "I'd wake up every day with a big, authentic smile, even as a kid. Sometimes they looked so little on the horizon, and other times they'd just be gigantic. But all the time, damn, those mountains were beautiful."

And sometimes, Allen says, he'd get to go up into those mountains. "When I was a kid, I-70 was just being built," he remembers. "We loved going up to Estes Park. Trail Ridge Road was huge for my whole family, heading up there in our big station wagon, us kids arguing with each other the whole way up." He rattles off several locales that anyone who grew up or raised kids in Colorado will recognize: Grand Lake, Camp Chief Ouray, Lake Granby, the Eskimo Ski Club Train up to Winter Park. "I still think of those places all the time," he says.

Allen attended Dora Moore Elementary, and remembers a favorite stop on the six-block walk home. "It was a place called Frank's Pharmacy, on the corner of Sixth Avenue. It had a soda fountain in the early days. I hate to admit it, but I was a bit of a shoplifter when I was a kid. We got caught once — the guy came out after we left and asked, 'Did you pay for those Lifesavers?' I told him we forgot, and he kindly just made us tell our parents. My mom told me not to do that again, and I didn't. Never shoplifted again. I did other things, of course," he laughs. "But not that."

Allen is joking about his time at Sandstone Federal Correction in Minnesota for nearly two and a half years in the late ’70s. He'd been caught with almost a pound and a half of cocaine at a Michigan airport, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the authorities for a lighter sentence than he might otherwise have received. The stint in prison interrupted the comedy career he'd begun in 1975, but Allen returned directly to it following his early parole, becoming a regular at L.A.'s Comedy Store.
Allen says his comedy has always stemmed from his upbringing, in both Colorado and Michigan. For proof of that, look no further than the city settings of his two hit sitcoms — first Detroit in Home Improvement, and then Denver in Last Man Standing. "It's all about growing up," he says, "and most of my growing up was all about Colorado."

Allen's standup has also been about men and women. "It's about the ultimate political parties — male and female," he jokes. "My comedy is centered on something I call masculine-ism. The foibles, the problems, the disgustingness and the brilliance of being a man. I live up at the top of a hill on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, and one day these guys were clearing out this big sewer. Just this gigantic cauldron of black water. Horrifying. And these guys are waist-deep in this stuff, and it stinks, and they're working to dig it out. And I went out and I was talking to them, and I said 'Boy, I'll bet there are a lot of women out there pissed that they don't get to do this kind of work.' They just shook their heads and said, 'No, no, not so much.' My joke is that there might be a glass ceiling, but this is the concrete floor. If there's a lousy job — and I mean that in the tactile sense — it's going to be a man doing it. Women are too smart for that.

"So my comedy is always about perspective," Allen says. "A fun perspective about men and women or different age groups or family stuff. I get it all from my dad and my grandfather — both such funny men. Even in the middle of tragedy, they were blessed to be able to see through it."

Allen has put that comedy to good use over the years, and in many ways. At one point in the early ’90s, his brother pointed out that he had a book (Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man) that was number one on the New York Times bestseller list; Home Improvement was number one in the Nielsens; and the first Santa Clause movie was number one at the box office. (Allen credits his brother for realizing this, and says he asked his publicist for years how they missed that.) For an entire generation, he'll either be known as Santa, Buzz Lightyear or, somehow, both.

Allen's most recent sleigh ride with good ol' Saint Nick is the second season of The Santa Clauses, which is available on Disney+. This time around, he's joined by his youngest daughter, Elizabeth Allen-Dick, who plays, appropriately enough, Santa/Scott Calvin's daughter Sandra. For a guy who's reached holiday heights previously only touched by George Bailey, Clark Griswold, Ralphie Parker and more Scrooges than even Bob Cratchit could count, Allen takes the long view. "Playing Santa taps into the highs and lows of my personality," he admits. "On the high side, I just consider myself blessed to be a part of everybody's Christmas. That's just great. But on the low, I have to admit, I've become somewhat competitive with other Santas I see. Like, I've become the arbiter of what Santa should be. His beard is too long; there should be bells on those boots, things like that."

A curious detail about Allen — who's nearly as well known for his unabashedly conservative views as for his entertainment career — is that his cousin is Jordan Klepper, the Daily Show correspondent who's become YouTube famous for on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters who have trouble logically explaining that unwavering support. Allen, who voted for Trump in 2016, admits now that the presidency "didn't work out so well." He says he's an infrastructure guy, and so he went with the real estate guy (Trump) thinking he could get things done. That all changed after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, when Allen withdrew his support. Despite their political opposition, Allen says he and Klepper get along, though they can "really go at it, fun-wise." He says he went to see Klepper do his own standup in L.A., and that he was "such a funny guy, and his perspective is sharp."

And Allen knows standup; after all, it's comedy that gave him his start. He recalls seeing one of his comedic heroes, Richard Pryor, and says it opened his eyes to what comedy could do, what laughter meant to an audience and what an audience's response meant for him. It's something he's looking forward to returning to when he comes home to Denver in February. "It's like seeing Rod Stewart in concert," he says. "I'll be running through some of my hits. I'll do my Maggie May, my old favorites."

This makes sense for a guy like Tim Allen, who's still that kid playing Capture the Flag in the streets around Third and Marion. "That's where my life became a life," he says. "It was all marvelous. That's Colorado to me."

Tim Allen performs at Bellco Theatre, 1100 Stout Street, 7 p.m. Friday, February 2. For more information and tickets, see the Bellco website.