Hotbed, a new comedy club, is scheduled to open in early 2022.

/ Photo courtesy of Sean Joyce

Hotbed, a new comedy club, is planned to open in early 2022 at the old Songbyrd Music House & Record Cafe location in Adams Morgan. The club will be the new home of Underground Comedy, the company behind comedy shows at The Big Hunt, the beloved club that closed in late 2020 after seven years in Dupont. Popville was first to report on the new club.

Sean Joyce, Underground Comedy’s founder and owner, says the new comedy club and bar will act as a home base, expanding the company’s schedule beyond its weekly shows across the District — at Room 808 (a new club in Petworth), Wild Days at Eaton DC, Reliable Tavern, and Wonderland Ballroom.

Located at 2477 18th Street NW, the ground level will feature a full-service bar and the comedy club will be in the basement. Joyce says he wasn’t looking specifically for a place in Adams Morgan, but when Songbyrd moved to a new location in Union Market last fall, he couldn’t pass up on a brick-and-mortar spot that matched all the qualities of a venue he was looking for: something similar to Big Hunt and Drafthouse Comedy Theater, another spot that closed during the pandemic.

“It’s just going to be a straightforward comedy club, where it’s just going to be all standup comedy shows,” Joyce says.

He knows what he’s talking about: Underground Comedy has been producing shows at a handful of venues since 2013. Washington City Paper named the company D.C.’s best comedy empire in 2017, and national names have taken the stage at Joyce’s shows. Hannibal Buress stopped by a show at Wonderland Ballroom in 2015, and Patton Oswalt, Judah Friedlander, and more stars have also done Underground sets.

As for the new space, Hotbed will most likely include free shows from local comedians earlier in the week, with ticketed shows from visiting New York and Los Angeles headliners on the weekends, Joyce says. There aren’t any current plans to include music acts at Hotbed.

“We we have a little bit of a different setup downstairs now that’s more conducive to comedy and will be less conducive to music, so I think we probably won’t do music,” Joyce says. “But you know, who knows?”

Many details are still in the works: furniture is still coming in, so Joyce can’t give an exact number for its capacity just yet (Songbyrd used to comfortably fit about 200 guests). Beyond comedy, Joyce says Hotbed’s kitchen will eventually offer a food menu.

Why the name Hotbed? Simply put, the name signifies a “place of rapid growth,” Joyce says. The Underground Comedy team hopes to pick up where it left off in 2020.

“We’re trying to re-create what we had at Big Hunt. That was a big loss,” says Joyce. “We had 11 shows a week there, leading up to the pandemic. We’d do like 500 shows a year at Big Hunt. So that’s just a ton of local comedy that’s not happening right now, and we’re trying to bring that back … We’re set up for a really big year.”

Hotbed is located at 2477 18th St. NW. Opening date TBD.

Filed Under: Adams Morgan, comedy, songbyrd music house, underground comedy,