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Snackin' & Yakkin'
Some podcast episodes follow a straight line. This one grabs a sugar-free Red Bull, a fistful of gummy bears, and sprints into traffic.
On the latest hang with BIG Ben Kennedy, Charleston comic Noah Brockett turns a loose, funny snack chat into something better. You get jokes, side roads, karaoke stories, and a sharp look at how he built a comedy voice that goes far beyond blindness. You can find the show on the Snackin’ & Yakkin’ YouTube channel.
Red Bull, gummy bears, and the perfect kind of mess
The snack lineup sets the tone fast: Red Bull, gummy bears, Airheads, and a late-game surprise, ice cream sandwiches. Noah had originally asked for Airheads and sugar-free Red Bull, then tossed in gummy bears late at night because, in his words, they’d be fun on the show. He was right.
The gummy bears quickly became their own running bit. Noah kept eating them in pairs because it felt more “romantic,” which somehow turned tiny candy into Bonnie and Clyde. Airheads, on the other hand, were a terrible podcast food. Chewy candy and conversation don’t mix, unless your goal is total chaos.
Ben and Noah also waste no time roasting each other. Ben jokes about Noah’s cane and glasses, then piles on with fake diagnoses and relationship commentary. Noah fires back with the same dry, sideways energy that makes him fun to listen to. Even Ben’s decision not to trim up for the camera becomes a bit, with both of them leaning into the whole schlubby, unpolished charm of the setup.
Noah Brockett doesn’t want blindness to be the whole act
Brockett is blind, and he talks about it on stage, but he’s clear about one thing.
“I don’t want to be Noah Brockett the blind comedian.”
That doesn’t mean he avoids the subject. It means he refuses to let it do all the work. He talks about the difference between using blindness as material and using it as a crutch. After doing longer sets packed with blind jokes, he realized it could get exhausting, even when the set worked.
That idea leads to one of the best parts of the conversation. Noah explains that blindness is a spectrum, not one fixed experience. He can still detect light and color in a small window of vision, though he describes it as grainy and distorted. That’s why stage lights don’t hit him the way sighted comics describe them. He can tell where some light sources are, but he’s never picking out faces in the crowd.
His medical story is serious, and he tells it without trying to make it sound neat. He first noticed something was wrong at age nine, when part of his vision disappeared while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. He was first diagnosed with NMO, short for neuromyelitis optica, a rare autoimmune disease that can affect the optic nerves and central nervous system. A good general explainer is this Cleveland Clinic overview of neuromyelitis optica. Later, his diagnosis changed to CRION.
Learning independence, then finding the stage
Before comedy took hold, Brockett went through training at the Louisiana Center for the Blind adult program. That part of the episode matters because it shows how much of his path was built on discipline, not luck.
He learned cane travel, Braille, accessible tech, apartment living, and other daily skills that pushed him toward full independence. Students lived in their own apartments, cleaned for themselves, bought food, and worked on a real schedule. That structure clearly stuck with him.
Comedy, though, arrived through a stranger route. He loved Robin Williams as a kid, especially after seeing Robots, and later got deeper into stand-up. He also got a Make-A-Wish trip to meet Stan Lee in Los Angeles, which fits neatly with the nerd streak that runs through this whole conversation.
His first attempts at performing were rough and charming. He did a coffee shop mic while solving a Rubik’s Cube, then stalled so long on another mic opportunity that it got canceled before he ever went up. The real push came from a metal vocal coach, who told him to stop talking about stand-up and try it. That led to hosting between bands at a metal show in Ruston, Louisiana, where he did a few short comedy sets and got his first real reps.
Japan, Charleston, karaoke, and one excellent ending
After Louisiana, Brockett moved to Tokyo for several months to study Japanese and live with a host family. Then the stars lined up. A person at his school connected him to a comedy club, he started hitting open mics, and he treated joke writing like homework. He studied, rewrote, got on showcases, and eventually got paid.
That’s also where Charleston entered the story. Comics in Japan mentioned the local scene here, especially the Sparrow, and that helped pull him to South Carolina.
The rest of the episode keeps bouncing in all directions, which is half the fun. There’s talk about his roommate Graham Kotas, a cat named Pigeon apparently absorbing Dune, St. Patrick’s Day parade headaches, Ben’s “Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend” shirt, and Noah shredding Toxicity at karaoke with metal-style screams. If you want to keep up with his shows and clips, he’s on Noah Brockett’s Instagram.
The best payoff comes at the end. After joking about ice cream sandwiches for most of the conversation, they finally appear. Not normal ones, either, but novelty treats that look like fried chicken, complete with a pretzel “bone.”
That’s the whole episode in one image, funny, weird, and far more thoughtful than it first appears.
