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Snackin' & Yakkin'
When Laura Dixon left her restaurant-management job, she gave herself two options: “get sad or get weird.” She picked weird, went to an open mic alone, and told a roomful of strangers how a Domino’s delivery driver gave her a cat.
On this episode of Snackin’ & Yakkin’, Laura and BIG Ben Kennedy talk about the set that started her comedy career, the jokes she found on the road, and her hopes of writing sketches. If you’re here for the snack, she also brought gluten-free chocolate-chip banana bread. The story starts with that first night at The Sparrow.
Leaving restaurant management and choosing stand-up
Laura started doing stand-up in 2019, when she was 28. At the time, she worked in restaurant management, a job that took up much of her time and shaped her friend group. When she and the restaurant parted ways, she remembers walking out with a choice running through her head.
“I can either get sad or I can get weird.”
She went to Planet Fitness, got on an elliptical, and decided that trying stand-up would be her version of getting weird. It was something she’d wanted to do for years.
Comedy had been part of her life since childhood. Her mom loved Saturday Night Live, and Laura still has a framed photo of her mother dressed as Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna at her college sorority house. Laura was such a devoted viewer that she came home from her senior prom to watch the show.
A hot pink blazer and five minutes about a cat
Laura’s first open mic was on a Monday at The Sparrow, with Heath Richardson hosting. She went by herself and worried so much about what to wear that she took apartment selfies and texted them to her best friend. She settled on a hot pink blazer, which she still has.
She didn’t arrive with a polished set. Instead, she spent five minutes telling the story of how she got her cat from a Domino’s delivery driver. People laughed. Sitting alone afterward, Laura knew she wanted to do it again.
Heath came over and told her she was funny. He mentioned another open mic at Tin Roof that Wednesday, and Laura kept going. The pandemic interrupted the early stretch of her comedy career, but she and Ben agree that she began appearing much more regularly on Charleston show flyers a few years later.
Charleston open mics, early spots, and a stormy show
Laura and Ben had crossed paths at open mics without finding much time to talk. Ben admits that he has a habit of dropping in, then disappearing. Between work, family, and keeping Snackin’ & Yakkin’ on a weekly schedule, he hasn’t made it to Wit’s End as often as he’d intended.
They also compare notes on sign-up lists. Both have seen the earliest spots fill fast at local open mics, and Ben remembers a time when hardly anyone wanted to go first. Laura recalls getting to Wit’s End around 6:30 while still listening to a workshop on headphones because arriving at 7 could leave her far down the list. Ben says he doesn’t want a host to move him ahead of someone who needs an early spot.
One recent show made the trip out worthwhile for Laura: Comedy Between the Greens at Social 19, on a lineup with MK and Tink. Heavy rain had caused flooding in West Ashley, and she feared her friends wouldn’t make it. They did, and the audience was eager to be there. Laura loved the room’s couches and old-school nightclub feel, along with the chance to work beside two friends.
MK comes up throughout the conversation, from open-mic hosting to advice about personal material. Ben and MK also talked comedy and sign-up strategy in MK Kern’s Snackin’ & Yakkin’ episode.
What Laura learned when her jokes met new audiences
Laura has tried an open mic at Eastville Comedy Club in Brooklyn, performed at the Laugh Riot Girl festival in Los Angeles, and returned regularly to North Carolina. She says the upcoming North Carolina Comedy Festival would be her fourth. She’d also like to try more shows in Florida, perhaps in Jacksonville or Orlando.
Los Angeles caught her off guard. Some jokes she felt sure would land didn’t get the response she expected. Meanwhile, lines she treated as throwaways drew big laughs. Ben and Laura discuss how crowds in different places respond to different things, without settling on a neat rule for why it happens.
North Carolina has become a favorite place for her to perform. She calls the Idiot Box in Greensboro her second home club and tries to get there a couple of times a year. More than a change of audience, those trips have given her room to find new material.
Two jokes that changed in North Carolina
At her first North Carolina Comedy Festival, Laura had a bit about being tall and wearing all black so she’d look like a giant crow. While getting ready backstage, fellow comic Aaron Lockach dared her to caw during the joke. Laura did it, despite another comic’s warning, and the audience laughed so hard that the caw became a regular part of her set.
On a later trip, a new line appeared in a bit about Gen Z, vaping, and older generations who used to smoke. Addressing young people, she added, “You little Gen Zers, ’cause you don’t care about death yet.” The room broke into laughter, and she says she can hear comedian Germaine Colado laughing on the recording.
Laura connects both moments to being somewhere different, spending time with other comics, and letting an established bit take a turn she hadn’t planned.
Travel, money, and finding your people
Ben understands the pull of performing away from home. Early in his comedy career, he wanted a calendar packed with gigs and took work in small towns across Pennsylvania and Virginia. Travel costs piled up, though. As an MC, he wasn’t getting a hotel room covered, and eventually money and family responsibilities limited how far he could go.
After moving to Charleston, comedy helped him build a friend group of his own. He recalls winning a preliminary night of the Funniest Person in Charleston competition at Theatre 99, then performing in the finals at the Music Farm. Through the scene, he met people including Ike and Apples.
That desire to spend time with creative people is part of why he brought Snackin’ & Yakkin’ back. Laura recognizes the feeling. She says there’s something important about finding your people on purpose, whether they’re in a familiar Charleston room or a club a few states away.
Family, therapy, and the limits of stage stories
Laura describes her older brother as a terrific audience member who loves to laugh. She thinks he’s funnier than she is and would love to see him try stand-up. He’s supportive of her work, too, even if watching a sibling perform feels different from watching a comic whose life you don’t know.
Ben talks about another kind of family support. His son, who studied psychology, sometimes gives him feedback about conversations on the show. Ben values that perspective, but he’s clear that his son isn’t his therapist and shouldn’t have to fill that role.
The distinction leads to a conversation about personal stories in comedy. Laura likes honesty onstage, but she sees a line between sharing an experience and bringing an audience into something a performer is still struggling to process. Ben recalls MK’s point that a comic talking about painful material may need to let the audience know they’re okay. Otherwise, people might spend the set worrying about them instead of listening to the joke.
Banana bread built for a gluten-free episode
Laura brought the snack herself: homemade gluten-free banana bread loaded with chocolate chips. She eats gluten-free, so making the snack gave her something she could enjoy alongside Ben.
She says the bread has no processed sugar apart from the chocolate chips she used. She normally buys zero-sugar chips, but the store didn’t have them this time. Ben approves of her generous use of chocolate and then gets a bite with more banana flavor. His son has already made quick work of a slice behind the cameras.
They also open Peach Revival, a drink Laura often has in the morning instead of coffee. Ben is sensitive to caffeine, so he decides to sip rather than finish it quickly. Both find the peach flavor light; Ben compares it to an uncarbonated LaCroix. Laura’s morning-drink routine has one seasonal exception: pumpkin spice time.
That sends her into a bit about how one cool fall breeze can cause a pumpkin spice latte to appear in a woman’s hand, whether she meant to order one or not.
The detours: pets, paramedic work, and a musician at work
The conversation makes plenty of room for pet stories. Laura talks about her cat startling herself awake with a silent fart. Ben remembers his dog Jake, who usually delivered silent but unmistakable ones, then once made a sound that left Ben wondering how a dog without human-style butt cheeks had managed it. Jake had died on the Fourth of July, and Ben remembers him fondly.
Ben’s past work as an EMT and paramedic takes the conversation somewhere more serious. He describes attending autopsies during paramedic school and the shock of seeing how much the inside of a rib cage resembled meat in a store. Laura says a filmed chicken killing in a college class made her sick enough to leave. The discussion moves through school dissections, her choice of dance over AP Biology, and Ben’s unusual path to his first autopsy.
Ben also talks about working through the COVID period in protective gear, including months of heat rash and constant sweating. He felt that EMTs and paramedics received less public recognition than other health workers, even though they transported patients before anyone knew whether those patients had COVID. Laura hears how demanding the work was.
A happier backstage story concerns Shinedown bassist Eric Bass, whom Ben’s wife knew growing up. Ben took his son to see the band, and his son got to watch someone he knew as “Mr. Eric” do his job onstage. Laura loves that way of putting it.
Laura’s sketch-writing plans
Laura enjoys performing, but her dream job is writing for Saturday Night Live. Sketch writing is especially fun for her, and she’d like to spend more time on it over the next two years. Her interest goes back to those childhood nights watching the show with her mother; now she’s thinking about writing sketches herself. NBC’s look at how SNL sketches make it to air offers a closer look at the process that fascinates her.
A move to New York might not fit her family’s circumstances. If it doesn’t, Laura says she could make sketches for Instagram or YouTube. She and Ben trade favorites among online creators, including millennial sketches Laura enjoys, cat videos her mom sends her because they resemble Laura’s cat Domino, and It’s a Southern Thing. Ben remembers one of that group’s genie sketches, in which a wish to fly north runs into the rule that all flights go through Atlanta.
Charleston, dolphins, and a sketch idea with teeth
Laura was born in Summerville and has family ties that keep her in the Charleston area. Ben, who moved from Baltimore, says his view of living there has softened. He also thinks the reality show Southern Charm gives some newcomers a misleading picture of ordinary life in the city.
Then there are the dolphins. Ben says he seems to spot them often around Charleston, including while waiting near the water during a paramedic call. He also recalls a SeaWorld behind-the-scenes visit when a dolphin repeatedly splashed him. A staff member told him she was flirting with him because she liked deep voices. Laura, who once worked on a boat, says she used to tell visitors that dolphins decide when they want to come near people.
Together, they turn Ben’s dolphin encounters into a sketch idea. Perhaps the dolphins have been drawing him in for years because they have a grudge. Soon they’re picturing gangster dolphins, a tank confrontation, and Charleston comics voicing the whole crew. It’s a joke they build together, not a finished production.
The improv fits Ben’s invitation near the end of the episode. He asks Laura to collaborate on a show or sketch sometime, and she’s in.
A serious final turn
Before they wrap, Ben addresses a myth he heard during his medical career: that first responders would let a registered organ donor die to obtain their organs. He strongly rejects it. Laura shares that her father had made his wish to donate clear before he died following a stroke and aneurysm. He remained on life support for two days as the donation process continued.
It’s a personal story in the middle of a conversation that has also included banana bread, stage cawing, and dolphin crime. Ben and Laura let it sit with the honesty they’d been talking about earlier.
Getting weird, then keeping at it
Laura’s first set began with a decision made after a hard day, a hot pink blazer, and a cat story she hadn’t shaped into a full act. The audience laughed, Heath told her to keep going, and she did.
Years later, she still makes room for surprises: a caw dared into a set, a line that appears on a North Carolina stage, or a dolphin sketch invented across a snack table. Getting weird was the start of it. The rest came from going back out and seeing what happened.
