In some cities, home is less a roof and a water bill than it is a place in your heart. That’s especially true in D.C., where rising housing costs keep residents relocating like hermit crabs, or where booming careers can send rising stars to bigger audiences in New York or Los Angeles.

Just ask the cast of DC Comedy Homecoming!, a showcase bringing together “DMV Homegrown Comedians” on October 26 as part of the Bentzen Ball Comedy Festival. Comedian Tig Notaro will host the performance, which will feature Jay Pharaoh, Aparna Nancherla, Rory Scovel, Jermaine Fowler, Judah Friedlander, Yamaneika Saunders, Seaton Smith, and more.

Produced by Brightest Young Things and curated by Notaro, the Bentzen Ball is celebrating a decade of the festival, which this year includes shows from Maria Bamford, Roxane Gay, the cast of HBO’s Los Espookys, and Jaboukie Young-White. The comics all stay in the same hotel, no matter how famous they are (or aren’t), and BYT organizes activities so performers can hang out and play tourist. During the first festival in 2009 comics took a Segway tour of the National Mall and went bowling at the White House.

“I remember it being so much fun, because you’re with a bunch of people who are going to make jokes the whole time,” Rory Scovel says.

He and other comics are coming in from N.Y., L.A., and … OK, mostly just those two cities–for the homecoming show, but are they coming “home”? Can you call it a “homecoming” for a cast member who was raised outside of the city limits, moved over a decade ago, or arrived fully grown and paying taxes?

Born in Gaithersburg, Judah Friedlander says “yes and no” when asked if D.C. feels like home. “When you put it that way, it’s hard to say no to that, but Maryland is where I grew up.”

D.C. is, however, where he first performed standup. “There was a comedy club called Garvin’s,” says Friedlander, an alum of 30 Rock. “It closed years ago, but that was the first place I ever went up.”

Friedlander is one of those comics whose work you can see on Netflix, but the jokes he’ll share at the homecoming show will be different from the ones audience members might have heard in his 2017 comedy documentary America is the Greatest Country in the United States. “It will be similar thematically, but all new material,” he says.

The writer, director, actor, and comedian is used to touring solo, performing 80-minute-long sets. The homecoming show will be a different experience. There’s no headliner, and all of the comics will have roughly the same amount of stage time.

“This is kind of fun because I get to see a bunch of other comics and hang out with them for a bit,” he says, “and then I get to see my folks and my brother.”

Scovel only spent three years in D.C., but doesn’t hesitate to say that the birthplace of his comedy career feels like home. To him, coming back for the homecoming show and spending time with his peers feels like a high school reunion. “The men and women you start performing with kind of feels like your graduating class as you move on,” says Scovel, who starred opposite Amy Schumer in last year’s I Feel Pretty and has years of stand-up under his belt. “You really seldom see each other after that first three years in this job.”

That sense of reunion applies not only to the people he’ll share the stage with in a few weeks, but also to those who’ll sit in front of it. When he comes back to the area and gets on stage, Scovel says he can’t help but wonder if there are people in the audience who remember seeing him before he had a clue what he was doing.

“Every now and then when I’m at the Improv, someone will show up and be like, ‘I used to come see you forever ago at Dr. Dremo’s out in Clarendon,’” Scovel says. “I always feel like that’s just such a cool thing, almost like people are a part of this thing, even though you’re not technically.”

Seaton Smith isn’t “from” here either. A Howard University alum, Smith came to D.C. to study film. It was during that time, in 2003, that he decided to give comedy a serious go as a career.

One of the Bentzen Ball originals, he was a local comic when he performed in that first festival. He helped book D.C.-area talent as openers for some of the shows. He lives in Brooklyn now, and has a starring role on the short-lived Fox sitcom Mulaney and a stint on Comedy Central’s Alternatino under his belt, but that doesn’t mean D.C. isn’t home, at least in a sense. “D.C. is the place I kind of became myself,” Smith says. “There’s a weird comfort and love in D.C. that I haven’t found anywhere else.”

The son of a minister and a political science professor, Smith says his time in the nation’s capital gave him a different perspective on the news. “When friends of mine now in New York get so heated, I just laugh because I’m always thinking about my D.C. friends who laugh at what’s going on in politics,” he says. “I’m always thinking of that mentality and just enjoy the game of it all instead of panicking and saying that the world is gonna end.”

Raised two hours away in Aberdeen, Md., Yamaneika Saunders doesn’t hold by Friedlander’s geographically-restrictive (albeit, legal) definition of “D.C.” For her, it stretches well beyond Gaithersburg, and definitely feels like “home.”

“I consider D.C. and Baltimore the same thing,” says Saunders, who’s made regular appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and hosted the podcast Rantin’ and Ravin’. “I think a lot of people do as well, except for maybe the people that’ve been beefing over go-go music for the last 20 years.”

The geographic boundaries of D.C. don’t really matter to organizers, either. At least not for show branding. “We toyed with the idea of calling it the DMV Homecoming Show initially,” BYT’s Svetlana Legetic says. But once organizers learned more about the performers’ personal histories and the role played by comedy clubs in D.C. proper, it didn’t seem as important to split hairs over cast members who were raised in the suburbs…even of Baltimore. Plus, “D.C. Area Comedy Homecoming!” is a bit of a mouthful.

“It’s not my home anymore, but it’s where I was raised,” Jermaine Fowler says. He was born in Northwest D.C., and grew up in Prince George’s County. A lot of his family is still here, and will command most of his free time while the actor and comedian is in town. He has to get back to filming Coming 2 America, the forthcoming sequel to the 1988 comedy Coming to America.

“I love my comedy peers, but I usually do see them outside of D.C. at other events or shows,” he says. “Whenever I come home, I’m usually here for the weekend, so if I don’t go visit my dad and my grandmom, they’ll be real upset with me.”

Fowler says he’s proud to be from the D.C. area. But when he talks about his hometown, he makes it clear he’s not talking about Washington.

“I’m grateful for Hyattsville, how it shaped me and made me the person who I am,” he says. “Me growing up in Hyattsville definitely formed the way I think and approach comedy.”

He says he’s noticed that D.C. comedy-goers are very smart, but he doesn’t like to put labels on his audiences. Most people come to a comedy show to laugh. “Nothing is too taboo, in my experience, for D.C. audiences in comedy clubs,” Fowler says. “They want to laugh, and if you’re funny, they’re going to appreciate you.”

Seaton Smith describes a different experience with hometown crowds. “Right now there’s this whole wave of ‘You can’t say that in front of anybody.’ D.C. was like that in, like, 2007,” he says. “[D.C. audiences] have just been politically savvier and they’ve always been sensitive to other people.”

The city’s social awareness extends even to spaces designed for entertainment—at least, that’s what Rory Scovel thought when he started doing stand up in D.C. “I perceived that everybody in the audience was just so smart that it made me feel like I had to either be super silly or if I said an opinion on something that was real, I really needed to know what I was talking about,” he says.

He says that perception may have made him a stronger comic, or at least one who respects his audience’s intelligence. “I think maybe over the course of my career it allows me to see in all audiences, like okay, anybody in here might be able to call me on my bullshit,” he says.

Saunders says, in D.C., she and the audience both know what she’s talking about. “You just have an easier time speaking about it with a crowd that lives it and understands it,” she says. “People just get it.”

That’s especially true when references to local culture work their way into her standup. Here, she’s a hometown girl and can joke about having access to the White House, the pains of commuting by Metro, and how the D.C.-area accent makes a ballpark classic sound like “hot doug.”

However they define “D.C.” and “home”, and whether or not they claim the former as the latter, the cast members of DC Comedy Homecoming! do seem to agree: It’s nice to come back.

DC Comedy Homecoming! is October 26 at 8:30 p.m. at the Entertainment and Sports Arena. Tickets are $25. 

This post has been updated with the correct date for the DC Comedy Homecoming!