BALTIMORE -- What happens when a scientist walks into a comedy club? If it’s Matt Hurley, he steps up to the mic.
“It didn’t feel good,” Hurley, 31, said of his first times attempting standup in the Baltimore area at places like Wits End Saloon in Timonium and Zissimos Bar in Hampden. That was last February, when the Chicago transplant was beginning to dip his toes into a new world.
Hurley had long been more accustomed to experiments of a different kind. As part of a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University that began in 2018, he tracked how certain biomarkers changed in blood drawn from patients with anorexia, as they gained weight. He’s co-authored papers on topics including “leptin-induced behavioral and molecular changes in rats,” and holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Wisconsin’s Marquette University.
But in September, Hurley “hung up the lab coat,” as he put it — to take comedy, of all things, seriously. That’s when he opened The Port Comedy Club, a dimly-lit, laid-back venue in Fells Point on the east side of Broadway Square.
Telling jokes “was all I could think about,” said Hurley, who lives in Upper Fells Point with his wife, Amie.
The club has quickly become a go-to spot in Baltimore for a cohort of local and national comedians to test out new material with easygoing crowds. Jordan Rock, Chris Rock’s younger brother, was The Port’s first big-name act; New York comics Eric Neumann and Liz Miele have made appearances and so will podcaster Joe DeRosa.
In Hurley’s early days of performing at open mics, he kept the hobby close to his chest. When a Hopkins undergraduate student caught him performing a set at Magooby’s Joke House, and later asked him about it in the lab, Hurley reluctantly acknowledged his side gig.
“I was doing high-performance liquid chromatography, which is like a very intense chemical technique that would take all day” at the university, he said, explaining just how different his day job was from his nights doing comedy. “I was very all-business.”
Harshit Bhasin, the then-undergraduate student working with Hurley, said watching his mentor do stand-up was an unexpected experience.
“Matt was always easy to approach and sort of personable, he would joke around,” Bhasin, 22, said. “But he was also very serious when it came to work.”
After working alongside Hurley in the lab and then seeing him on stage, “my brain couldn’t, like, combine both of those facts together,” he said.
The transition to comedy was something Evan Hess, a friend of Hurley’s since college, never saw coming. The pair lived in the same dorm during their first year at Marquette and later, while both were on a premed track, wound up seated together in their human anatomy class.
He recalled Hurley doing open mics toward the end of graduate school, but Hess was more used to seeing his friend get up in front of a crowd to present scientific data. “He was an excellent public speaker,” Hess, 31, said.
Seeing his college buddy make a crowd of strangers laugh was “weird” and “kind of jarring at first,” Hess added. But where the pair used to talk science, “it’s all about comedy” nowadays, he said.
Hess, who also earned a Ph.D. in biology from Marquette, now lives in Otterbein and works as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Department of Psychiatry, where he studies the use of ketamine as an antidepressant.
He sees The Port as another avenue for Hurley to make a difference. “The amount of benefit that he will end up having to other people’s mental health — by having this comedy club and bringing people in, making them laugh — is going to be so much more profound overall, across time, compared to what his research could have provided,” he said.
For Hurley, work had begun to take a toll. “In the back of my mind, I was like, I don’t know if I can do this for 25 years,” he remembered thinking. As the end of his postdoctoral fellowship grew near, he began interviewing for professorial positions — but decided to pivot entirely instead.
Now, his background in science inspires some of his comedy.
“It’s about finding things that are unique to your life, real stories unique to your life,” Hurley said of the joke writing process.
In addition to saddling up to the mic, Hurley has taken on the role of janitor, DJ and security guard at The Port. Monday and Tuesday shows are free, made possible by tips from the audience and more crowded shows on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, which typically cost $10 or $20 to attend.
The club’s homey atmosphere has proven to be a draw to locals and performers alike, according to Umar Khan, a Baltimore-based comic who grew up in Catonsville. “It’s one of the best ways to see comedy, in a small, intimate room,” Khan, 34, said.
Last year, Hurley included him in a show he organized in Fells Point. A school psychologist by day, Khan has performed for over a decade, for a while commuting to Washington, D.C. to perform at multiple venues per night. But when the coronavirus pandemic set in, Khan felt himself “starting to slow down,” he said — he no longer wanted to drive during rush hour or muster energy for unpaid gigs.
Now, he frequents The Port three to four times each week. It’s where he recently filmed his third special, “Let’s Talk About It,” which he plans to release on YouTube in April.
“The Port has just been a blessing,” he said. “Baltimore, we’ve always had a comedy scene, it just struggles. We’re a small city.”
The new club’s location is ideal, according to Khan. And unlike at some standup venues, where comics perform for other comics waiting to get up on stage themselves, the audience is made up of people who just want to sit back and have a laugh.
On a Monday night in mid-March, The Port hosted a string of acts focused on dating apps, interracial friendships, TV shows, juice cleanses and the pitfalls of cobblestone streets.
Audience members — about 15 showed up that evening — brought their own food and drinks. Nowadays, all shows are catered with beer, wine, cocktails and small bites, Hurley said.
In early March, Hurley secured a liquor license for the club, where he hopes to soon operate a “full bar,” he said. The lack of drink minimums, traditionally enforced at most other venues, will stick around.
By now, Hurley has proven an ability to take chances and roll with the punches.
“There’s a lot of times that you eat it, or you bomb, as comics say,” he explained of performing jokes that don’t land. “But even then, even if you had a couple things work, that was enough to get you to go to the next show, to get you to go to the next open mic.”
