Epic Comedy Berlin

A club built on one rule

Epic Comedy Berlin describes itself as an English-speaking comedy club "dedicated to quality and professional stupidity", and it is the first half of that phrase that governs the booking. The club runs weekly stand-up nights across central Berlin with rotating line-ups, and its pitch has not changed: no open mics, no beginners, no hobbyists, only comedians who have already done the hours. Its own website puts it at ten years running, with five-star ratings across more than 500 reviews, though it does not publish a founding date and the story of its first nights is not written down anywhere public.

What is written down is who runs it. Three working comedians, Ori Halevy, Brendan Hickey and Aaron, operate the club between them, and all three still perform on its stages. Hickey is Irish, has lived in Berlin for almost ten years and holds a master's degree in philosophy, a detail that matters later. His own description of the job is the plainest account of the club's premise: "Hi, I'm Brendan. I do stand-up in Berlin. In English. In front of Germans. On purpose, several times a week."

The rooms have always been the sort the club describes as "underground Berlin rooms, cool bars and brick walls that have seen things". For most of its life that has meant the back rooms of bars, and its shows still live in cellars and side rooms rather than theatres, with one recent exception that marks the biggest change to its programme in years.

Three nights a week

The programme in September 2026 runs on three fixed nights. Wednesdays bring Saying The Wrong Thing at The Wall Comedy on Grünberger Straße in Friedrichshain, an evening the club bills as "pro comics f*cking around": experienced comedians trying new material and pulling apart jokes that already work, in front of an audience that knows that is the deal. Doors are at half past seven with the show at half past eight, and it finishes around ten.

Fridays are the flagship. The Epic Comedy Showcase plays the jazz cellar downstairs at Zosch on Tucholskystraße 30 in Mitte, doors at eight, show at nine, running to roughly half past ten. It is the show most of the club's reviews are about and the one that carries the "cream of the crop" tagline: established and emerging English-speaking comedians doing tight sets of original stand-up, curated on quality alone. Listings on visitBerlin and Humanitix show it booked every Friday from 11 September through to the end of December 2026.

Saturdays, from 12 September 2026, belong to Darkest Thoughts, the club's improvised game-show, which has left the bar circuit for the Wilhelmshütte at Monbijou Theater on the Spree. It is a different animal from the other two nights, and the club has built its autumn around it.

Darkest Thoughts leaves the back room

Darkest Thoughts has run for seven years, most of that time in the back rooms of bars. The format is in two halves. In the first, established comedians perform around ten minutes each. In the interval the audience are asked to "anonymously write down their darkest, weirdest, most unhinged thought on a slip of paper", the slips go into a hat, and in the second half the comedians read them cold "for the first time in front of a full room, and turn them into stand-up on the spot". Brendan Hickey hosts, and Ori Halevy is among the regulars on stage.

The show played its last bar-room date on 3 July 2026 and took a summer break. In a post dated 11 July the club said it would return on 5 September as a Saturday show at Monbijou Theater, promising "a new night, a new home, and a much more civilised start time". By the time Aaron wrote up the move on 28 August the run had firmed up as every Saturday from 12 September to 7 November 2026, doors at eight, show at half past, at €10 early bird or €15 general admission. The theatre sits at Monbijoustraße 3b in Mitte, a short walk from the Friday room at Zosch, which puts both of the club's Mitte nights within the same few streets.

Summer 2026: the clips went quiet

The club's most candid recent statement is that same July post, titled "What's New at Epic Comedy Berlin (Summer 2026)". It explains why the club's social feeds had gone silent. The team had filmed more than 60 live shows at the Edinburgh Fringe the previous year, on top of its Berlin nights, and was sitting on a backlog of unedited footage. Rather than keep pushing clips out, they stopped: "we realised we were spending more time editing and uploading than making things good."

In its place the club has started building slower channels. The Wise Fools Podcast is Hickey's creation and draws on that philosophy degree, with rotating comedians including Ori Halevy and Dayne Brasher; its first episode takes on Mark Fisher's idea that culture is stuck on repeat. It was planned as a monthly series and is currently on hold while the club reorganises. There is a monthly newsletter with show recommendations, podcast news, free drink offers and jokes in development, and a free Patreon tier offering uncut podcast episodes and a Discord community. Hickey also writes for the club's blog; his piece of 4 August 2026, "The most Irish thing about me breaks the Germans", is the closest the club has come to a manifesto for performing English comedy to a German room.

What the room says

The audience feedback is unusually consistent. The Trustindex aggregation of the club's reviews, read in September 2026, shows a score of 4.9 out of 5 across 460 reviews, 439 of them five stars and only four at one star. The most recent, from September 2026, are short and to the point. Ari Goldiman called it a "Very funny show" with an "Extremely funny" host. Henry Timms wrote "Amazing show, well worth it! Would highly recommend!" Nadia Desai found "Great comedians, really friendly atmosphere and lots of laughs". Tripadvisor reviewers make the same points and single out Ori as the host who holds the Friday room together.

The criticisms are few and specific. One reviewer, Lisa M, found the host's jokes "cheap and tasteless" at times while praising the other three comedians on the bill and the bar staff, which is as good a description of the Friday format as any: a host plus three acts, in a bar, where the tone set at the top of the show is the tone of the night. The other recurring notes are the intimacy of the rooms, the friendliness of the staff and the fact that a Friday ticket costs whatever the audience decides the show was worth.