Magooby's Joke House, the Timonium comedy club known for packing in national headliners, is opening a second location in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood. The new room will seat roughly 120 to 130 people, a fraction of the club's suburban home, and will offer stand-up six nights a week alongside a full restaurant and bar.
Owner Andrew Unger, who also runs Magooby's Timonium club, announced the plans for the Hampden spot, according to CBS News Baltimore. Unger said Magooby's has wanted a Baltimore City location for quite some time, and he pointed to The Avenue's mix of restaurants, independent businesses and arts-and-culture identity as reasons the strip suits an intimate comedy club. The station reports the new venue will keep Magooby's commitment to customer service, food and professional sound, while also carving out more room to feature rising local and regional talent through occasional showcases, improv, storytelling and other live programming.
Before the doors open, Magooby's still has to work through licensing, construction and renovation, per the same report, with Unger targeting the first quarter of 2027. That timeline will run through Baltimore City's Class B beer, wine and liquor licensing process, which carries a $2,060 annual fee plus a mandatory $500 live entertainment permit, according to Maryland Code and Court Rules, with the fee schedule set under a 2024 session law.
A Much Smaller Room Than Timonium
The Hampden club represents a dramatic shift in scale for the Magooby's brand. The Timonium venue, housed in a converted dinner theater on Deereco Road since 2010, seats up to 400 people in an amphitheater-style layout, according to the Lutherville-Timonium Patch. Unger sought that larger suburban footprint specifically to draw top national touring acts, the outlet reported at the time. The planned Hampden room, by contrast, will hold less than a third of that capacity.
Magooby's origins trace back to 2007, when Unger and his brother Marc, a professional comedian, opened the club in a basement space beneath The Bowman restaurant in Parkville. Marc suggested the location after performing there, and weekly crowds grew from roughly 50 patrons to hundreds before the brothers outgrew the space, according to Baltimore Magazine. The Magooby's name itself is a mash-up of the childhood nicknames of Unger's two oldest sons, Mr. Magoo and Mr. B, a detail the Patch reported when the Timonium club opened.
Hampden's Existing Comedy Scene
Hampden is not without a comedy room of its own. The Lou Room, on the second floor of the historic Zissimos Bar on West 36th Street, already hosts stand-up, improv and showcase events on The Avenue. Zissimos Bar, founded in 1930, named the upstairs performance space after comedy legend Lou Costello, according to Zissimos Bar. Baltimore's broader comedy landscape also includes The Port Comedy Club in Fells Point and the nonprofit Highwire Improv, which runs a dedicated home base in Highlandtown along with shows at other city venues, per Highwire Improv.
Commercial comedy clubs have moved around Baltimore before. The Baltimore Comedy Factory operated for nearly three decades on Light Street before relocating to the Power Plant Live! entertainment district in March 2011, a move that brought in a 6,600-square-foot club to expand food service and nightly capacity, according to Cordish Companies. Magooby's own Timonium expansion followed a similar logic in 2013, when it added the attached Wits End Saloon, a whiskey-focused bar that now hosts open-mic comedy nights twice a week and serves as a feeder space for local talent, per Baltimore Magazine.
National Names Already on the Timonium Calendar
While the Hampden buildout proceeds, Magooby's Timonium club continues to host nationally known comedians alongside up-and-coming performers, per CBS News Baltimore. Pauly Shore is booked to perform on August 19, with Steve-O following for the three days after that. Craig Robinson and Ron Funches are both scheduled for October, and Michael Rapaport is set to appear in November. The club has also recently hosted Abbott Elementary star Lisa Ann Walter, a Silver Spring native who highlighted her Maryland roots during her headline run, according to The Baltimore Banner, as well as commentator and comedian Jimmy Dore in 2023.
Magooby's history of drawing crowds in the Baltimore region stretches back to shortly after the Timonium move, when the club averaged nearly 1,000 patrons per week across its weekend shows and staged a 24-hour marathon comedy event in January 2011 in pursuit of a Guinness World Record, the Patch reported. Whether the Hampden club can replicate that kind of draw in a room roughly a third the size, while sharing a neighborhood with The Lou Room's local comedy scene, remains to be seen as licensing and construction work continues toward the targeted opening.
