The Alameda Comedy Club opened in early 2021 with high hopes. Housed in a building that had once been Scobies sports bar and then a Korean BBQ spot on the city of Alameda’s Central Avenue, it was close to the hustle and bustle of the Island’s main drag downtown. By anyone’s estimation, it was an ideal setting for the glitz and glamour of stand-up comedy.

It opened during the COVID-19 pandemic, though. After putting up $200,000 to renovate the place, co-owner Patrick Ford had to wait and then finally get permission to open up an outdoor-only seating venue, then one indoors with distanced seating and masks required. They even had to close once because an employee got COVID.

“I thought running my own comedy club is something that I could do forever,” says Ford, a comedian in his own right who’s performed at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and other venues and also appeared on the TV show “Last Comic Standing.”

At 67, Ford — who is also an “OG” tech bro who’s worked as an executive at Microsoft, Yahoo and now has his own company — says he figured eventually that he’d “be that 80-year-old man in the back of the room going, ‘You’re not funny kid. Come back next Thursday.’ ”

Eventually, though, Ford and his wife, Lori Theis, a restaurant veteran who managed the food side of Alameda Comedy Club, decided enough was enough. After plugging along for four years, they decided to pull the plug in 2025.

“We were doing great in terms of people’s attitude towards us. We were the highest rated comedy club in the Bay Area, everyone adored us, five stars on Yelp, but we were just barely breaking even financially. And so my wife and I said, ‘Do we want to enlist for another five years?’ And at that point she said she had never really intended to stay long-term,” says Ford.

So they put the business up for sale, after which it was purchased by a group who plan soon to open a “high-end Mexican restaurant with a nice wood-fired grill. We loved doing it, but it’s all-consuming,” says Ford who is also in the midst of launching a startup “multimodal data platform for AI systems” called Eventual.

“I couldn’t really justify doing both the comedy club and the tech startup. If COVID hadn’t happened, I’d still be there,” says Ford.

For most, that would be the end of the story, but this is Alameda, a town full of people who need their live comedy fix. After closing up shop, Ford started hearing from folks.

“‘Hey, would you run a show here? Would you run a show there?’” says Ford. “And I said, sure. So instead of being ‘Alameda Comedy Club,’ I dropped the ‘Club.’ Now I’m just ‘Alameda Comedy.’ ”

So far Alameda Comedy has started putting on monthly shows on the second Saturday of each month in Alameda’s West End at Webster Street’s Fireside Lounge. They’ve also just started a Wednesday night showcase at the downtown Alameda Theater’s Cinema Grill.

Ford says the Fireside Lounge shows have sold out the last three months and that shows aboard Alameda’s USS Hornet and at Treasure Island’s Merced Restaurant have also exceeded expectations.

Like the stock market, stand-up comedy has its ups and downs. Ford thinks now it’s having a bit of a resurgence that he attributes to people being exposed to short clips of comics performing on YouTube and other platforms. He says the only problem with this is that audiences can become dangerously familiar with the comedian’s material as it becomes overexposed online.

“The way comedy works is once a person’s heard a set or a joke, you can’t do it again. It’s not like you go to see The Rolling Stones and you want to hear ‘Satisfaction’ every single time,” says Ford.

The same principle applies to stand-up, in which audiences don’t want to hear the same stuff they saw on their smartphones.

“That’s why going to see it live is great because you’re hoping to see new material and also spontaneous material,” says Ford.

The secret sauce of a live comedy performance is called “crowd work,” says Ford, who describes it as interacting with the crowd and “being in the moment.”

Nina G is one of the comedians who’ll perform at Alameda Comedy’s next show March 18 at the Cinema Grill. She didn’t let having a stutter keep her off the stage, has even written a book about the history of Bay Area stand-up and is the subject of a documentary filmed at the Alameda Comedy Club now on Amazon Prime, “Stutterer Interrupted” (stuttererinterrupted.com/the-special).

A fifth-generation Alamedan now living in Pleasanton, Nina G says she’s psyched to see comedy surviving on the Island.

“What comedy does is it forms a community. And to be able to laugh with people in your community is important. People obviously want that.”

For more information about upcoming Alameda Comedy shows and venues visit alamedacomedy.com.

Paul Kilduff is a San Francisco-based writer who also draws cartoons. He can be reached at pkilduff350@gmail.com.