“To five years,” says Marcel St. Pierre, raising a glass of scotch in the air. “I almost missed it.”

The toast is aimed at the upcoming birthday of Bad Dog Theater and the confession — that its artistic director didn’t notice that its fifth was coming up until a few weeks ago — is understandable. The Bad Dog name only goes back to 2003, true, but its lineage reaches back to the Trudeau years, and much of the time in between was spent trying to keep the name-changing improv house in business.

Bad Dog used to be Theatresports Toronto, the well-regarded haunt of Mike Myers, Kids in the Hall and many others which, after getting booted out of its digs in Harbourfront, wandered near-death around town for many years.

“A lot of people thought the show had run its course,” he recalls, sitting at a table in The Black Swan, the pub that is Bad Dog’s neighbor and semi-official watering hole. “Long form was the thing people wanted to do, and anybody who was really good at improv was auditioning for Second City.”

Things turns around when the gang — led by St. Pierre, Kerry Griffin and Ralph MacLeod — settled on a new name (for reasons “both legal and philosophical”) and into a permanent home on the Danforth. These days, the theater is again a must-go-to for fans of improv and home to many talented comics.

One of its bigger hits, the Klondike-set Dreadwood will reappear in June as a coproduction with Second City, and the theater will this summer invite companies including Montreal’s Without Annette and Seattle’s Unexpected Productions to its Bad Dog Improv Summit.

“People still talk about ‘back in the day,’” says St. Pierre, a spectacled and slightly built arch-improvisor who joined the company in ’91, after a dalliance in standup. “But I really want to recreate ‘the day’ here and now. There’s some amazing talent in the show, everybody I look at could be a potential star.”

The anniversary hoopla on Saturday (hastily planned, one assumes) will see Bad Dogs put on a show at 8pm, followed by a special installment of its Improvatron 3000 and an afterparty at the Swan.

Of course, the tricky thing about promoting (or, cough, previewing) an improv show is, duh, you often don’t know what it’s about until it happens. The thing could turn out to be a musical about pearl-diving duck puppets, or an all-Esperanto version of The Iliad.

So I ask St. Pierre to make something up.

“Pyrotechnics, a Japanese monster rising from the depths, a full make-up appearance by Kiss,” he says with a smirk, the scotch now empty. “And free nachos.”


Best bets:

Pauly Shore — who is still not dead, though he did just turn 40 if you can believe it — is in town to push his DVD Natural Born Komics and headlines at Yuk Yuk’s this week, Thursday through Sunday. $12-$19, 224 Richmond W. 416-967-6425

Got a spare $500? Former cast members of SCTV are on stage together for the first time in two decades on Monday and Tuesday, raising funds for the Second City alumni fund. No sign of Rick Moranis though, so fans of Bob McKenzie or Skip Bittman are out of luck. Take a pass on the VIP post-show and you might get in for $250. Second City, 51 Mercer. 416-343-0011.