No products in the cart.
Snackin' & Yakkin'
If our bipolar brain had a Pinterest board, it would be full of half-finished joke premises, screenshots of meds side effects, and pictures of gas-station snacks. So when standup comic Jayson Lee Rose rolled into Snackin’ & Yakkin’ with Jack Link’s and Mountain Dew Baja Blast, it felt like home in the most chaotic, Crazy way.
In this episode, we talk about Myrtle Beach comedy, brain injuries, mental health, Shriners, roller derby, and why we keep choosing a life where strangers judge us for 10 minutes at a time.
How We Met On Stage
We first crossed paths on a small open mic from the Comic Life crowd, then again at Frontier Lounge where Jayson was hosting. That was the night he was so tall on stage that if he stuck his arm out level, it rested right on Ben’s head.
“You’re still tall enough from the stage.”
We leaned into the bit and into a new comedy friendship.
The real bonding happened later at Dockside Bar on Edisto Island, where Craig and his wife treated the comics like gold. Edisto showed up hard for standup, and we cannot wait to get back out there. If you want a taste of how that room looks when comedy takes over, check out this post about comics hitting Dockside Bar on Edisto for a standup night.
For Jayson, that night was also a milestone; it was his first proper “green room,” which happened to be an actual dock with sandwiches, chips, and sodas.
First real green room on a dock with sandwiches!
We have no idea how anyone tops that.
Jayson’s Comedy Roots In South Carolina
From Florence To Myrtle Beach
Jayson was born in Charleston, grew up in Florence, and eventually chased life to the “big city” of Myrtle Beach. He jokes that the city can feel questionable depending on the block, but some of his best friends and favorite humans are from there.
Before comedy, he barbacked for about a decade at the biker bar Suck Bang Blow in Murrells Inlet, running drinks and looking after musicians in their green room with a pool table. That gig quietly trained him to be around loud people, chaos, and the occasional Kid Rock cover band.
Hosting Open Mics
These days, Myrtle Beach is where Jayson really stretches his comedy legs. He hosts open mics at I’m Not Here Sports Bar in Myrtle Beach and also works rooms like the Silver Dollar on King Street in downtown Charleston.
Every other week he makes the ride up Highway 17, soaking in all the weird tourist glory. We joke about Confederate flag beach towels, hermit crabs with painted shells, giant sharks over souvenir shops, and how those kitschy spots feel like the ones Ocean City and Folly Beach tore down years ago.
Myrtle still has them, and we are weirdly grateful. Someone has to sell flamingo towels and donut-print blankets that can barely dry one arm.
Myrtle Beach vs. Charleston Crowds
The crowds in Myrtle and Charleston feel like cousins with different coping skills.
In Myrtle Beach, people are excited to be there. Even in the off-season, folks drag their friends in and sign up for stage time like it is karaoke night for their soul.
- New people do full 10-minute sets for their bucket list.
- Some show up with nothing written, grab the mic, flail, say “thanks,” and walk off grinning.
Charleston crowds are more local, more used to seeing live shows, and often walk into bars that suddenly become comedy rooms. It can go from “we just came for drinks” to “why is this guy talking into a microphone” in 30 seconds.
That is why a room like Dreamers in Moncks Corner feels so special. It is literally a bar in a bowling alley, but when Comedy Shop and JJ’s crew set it up, it runs like a true comedy club inside a bowling center. People show up knowing it is a show, and they listen.
As Jayson puts it, everyone is funny somewhere, but comics are the ones “insane enough to do it” on purpose, in public.
Why We Keep Getting Onstage Anyway
Jayson started as a karaoke person. Once he tried standup, though, he realized the dopamine from a laugh blows the dopamine from a song straight out of the water.
Ben plays piano, so we ended up nerding out on timing, beats, and the way a punch line lands very much like a chord.
The body still panics every time. Right before a set, Ben always feels like he has to pee, no matter what. Jayson shakes in the car on the way to shows, feels like he might throw up, then comes off stage saying, “I’m really glad I did that.”
That teeny bit of nervous energy settles into a groove.
If it ever disappears, that is how we will know we do not care anymore.
We admit there is a lot of sadness, need for validation, and old parental junk in the mix. Who in their right mind wants to be judged for a living 200 nights a year?
Exactly. None of us are in our right mind.
Snack Break: Jerky & Baja Blast
For snacks, Jayson chose the full gas-station combo: Jack Link’s beef jerky with Mountain Dew Baja Blast.
Ben had never tried Baja Blast, so we grabbed the Zero Sugar version. First sip, he called it a cross between Surge and Fresca, or maybe Surge and Sierra Mist, with a strong citrus pop.
Jayson’s take was simple and important.
Big soda lies.
Even when the label screams “zero sugar,” we all assume Mountain Dew has found a way to sneak nonsense into our bloodstream.
From History Tours To Standup
Before standup, Jayson ran his own walking tour company in Charleston. He literally got paid to wake up and tell stories, sometimes the same story for the thousandth time.
He focused on the weird corners of local history, like:
- A drunk preacher baptizing a bear.
- The madam who got her street paved by telling the mayor, if he did not fix the mud, his wife would know exactly which street he had been walking down.
He watched tourists’ eyes light up when a story landed, and that became the addiction. Craft the sentence, drop the punch, watch the eyebrows lift.
A buddy named Rod finally got tired of hearing Jayson talk about “wanting to try comedy” and pushed him onto an open mic in Summerville. The bartender printed a receipt, Jayson scribbled jokes on it, then read them straight from the paper and got big laughs.
He did the same set at Wit’s End later with the same crumpled joke sheet. Over time he used notebooks mostly to test new material and change the order, especially after his brain injury made memory more of a daily puzzle.
The 2019 Crash And Coming Back
In 2019, everything changed.
Jayson was walking downtown in Charleston, crossing from a parking lot to a bar, when a car hit him. People assumed it was a motorcycle wreck because of the scars, but it was pedestrian versus vehicle at about 25 miles per hour.
He woke up in the back of an ambulance to a medic saying, “Welcome back, Mr. Rose,” and his first thought was that this looked expensive.
His injuries included:
- Subdural hematoma
- Fractured C6 and C7
- Five broken ribs
- Lacerated liver
To make it extra fun, it happened three weeks after he aged out of his parents’ insurance at 27. The bill was around $35,000.
He got on a payment plan and was back to giving tours in about two months. It was not smart, but it was survival.
Later, he landed in the VA system, found out nicotine had wrecked his pancreas enough to trigger pancreatitis, and had that classic comic reaction of, “Of course my pancreas is mad too.”
Mental Health, Meds, And That “Crazy” Brain
This whole conversation lives in a bipolar neighborhood, so we did not dodge the hard parts.
Ben talks openly about bipolar symptoms, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. He is doing meds, but it is messy. Doses change, side effects spike, and sometimes you end up on camera tugging at your hat and shirt because your nerves feel like a live wire.
Jayson has bipolar 1 and 2 and BPD, and the Army actually pays him for his diagnoses. He avoids medication right now because he is scared of losing his edge and because, in his words, it took 33 years to figure himself out. The idea of starting over chemically is huge.
Onstage, one missed punch line can flip a switch. You can see him start confident, then catch that one off moment and watch the anxiety climb as he fights to keep the set together.
Ben shares a heart-to-heart with him during the episode: most artists are the last ones to see their own value. Plenty of very confident comics are not doing as well as Jayson, which says a lot.
If you want more of that raw mix of jokes, snacks, and mental health talk, the full backlog lives on the Snackin’ & Yakkin’ YouTube channel, and the extra support that keeps the lights on and the jerky flowing comes from the Snackin’ & Yakkin’ Patreon.
You can also follow Jayson’s chaos directly on his Instagram.
Relationships, Roller Derby, And Looking “This Many”
Jayson’s girlfriend, Amber, is 26 but looks about 19. She gets carded at the front door of a bowling alley, before she even reaches the bar. It does not help that she orders drinks that “taste like Kool-Aid” or “a Capri Sun.”
Her new favorite bit when people ask her age is to hold up her fingers and say, “This many.” She also steals some of Jayson’s jokes and delivers them offstage, so people think he stole from her.
On the family side, Jayson’s older sister skated with the Lowcountry High Rollers roller derby crew. She went from promotions to jamming, and she and her wife were among the first 20 couples to sign a same-sex marriage license in South Carolina back in 2015.
Ben used to announce for derby, and one thing that scene teaches fast is not to assume anyone’s sexuality or toughness from their haircut. Some of the fiercest skaters are straight moms, and some soft-spoken types have wives you meet much later.
Quitting Jobs And Joining The Army On A Whim
Impulsive decisions are kind of our love language.
Jayson has a list of dramatic exits:
- He quit a barback job at the Suck Bang Blow Christmas party after the manager smacked his back. He walked out mid-shift.
- He gave his manager at Dudley’s gay bar 60 seconds to convince him to stay. The guy started with “Well, the thing is,” and Jayson just walked.
- He bailed on Ruby Tuesday forever when they announced a cheesy “Ruby day.”
- During a Charleston trip, his old job called from Florence to confirm his shift. It was a three-hour drive. He told them they had about an hour to say the magic words to get him in the car.
Ben is not innocent either. He once quit a hardware store on his lunch break during orientation. He said he had to run home to grab his Social Security card and simply never went back. Another time he chucked store keys on a desk, jumped out of a loading bay, and walked up the ramp to his car like it was a scene from his own biopic.
Jayson also joined the Army in a very bipolar way. The recruiting office sat between a Harley shop and a gun store, which tells you everything about their target audience. He walked in, half out of heartbreak, and basically said, “If you do not have any paperwork on me, I will sign right now.”
His earlier disqualification for a peanut allergy had aged out after ten years. His neck surgery and allergies did not make it into the system, because he told them he had “never even had the flu.” A few months later he was on a bus to Fort Jackson.
Why We Still Love This Life
For two people with loud brains, standup comedy is a strange kind of truce.
We deal with diagnoses, bills, near-death experiences, and more job quits than any HR department could track. Yet we keep saying yes to VFW halls, bowling-alley bars, Myrtle Beach open mics, and packed nights at places like Dockside on Edisto, where shows like the recent Dockside comedy lineup prove that small rooms can feel huge.
We do it because of that moment when someone’s eyes light up, or a bucket-list comic gets offstage shaking and says, “Thank you, that was all I wanted.”
If your own bipolar brain ever tells you that your passions are pointless or that you are too broken to chase joy, we hope this weird mix of Baja Blast, brain scans, and punch lines proves otherwise. Our brains might be Crazy, but they are still allowed to want things.
Thanks for reading, and if this hit you in a good way, come hang with us on Snackin’ & Yakkin, share it with a friend who “gets it,” and keep finding small reasons to laugh at the chaos.
More episode to be found on the blog!
