Comedian Rob Santos to host show at The Plant

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PITTSBORO — Comedian Rob Santos plans to bring some laughs to the Pittsboro community on Saturday night when he holds a comedy show with three of his stand-up comedy friends — Buddha Joe, CW Davis and Emily Siero — at The Plant at 192 Lorax Lane.

The Connecticut-based comedian has come to The Plant before when he hosted the WEBB Squared launch event in October. During the event, Santos shared he had a connection to North Carolina through his familial history — his ancestors had been enslaved in Raleigh, where his flight landed just a few weeks ago for the WEBB Squared event.

“When I got off the plane, it was tough,” Santos told the News + Record. “I did not understand the emotions of what was taking place.”

Santos talked to his mother about the emotions he felt when he stepped off of his plane at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. She suggested he may have been feeling the presence of his ancestors.

“She said it was the ghosts of my family walking around me,” Santos recounted. “I just felt this connection being there — it was almost like I had been there before.”

Santos said being a part of the WEBB Squared event helped to bring him a peace with his family’s past he had not known before, and for that reason, he knew he had to come back to Pittsboro one day.

“Being in a room with all these upstanding Black people and being in a room with all these upstanding white people and other people of color was a melting pot of a community and love,” Santos said. “Between that feeling of my ancestors and that coupled with the feeling of being at the WEBB Squared event to help kick off something that was important to them was something that was very meaningful.”

Santos said he’s been looking for a way to come back to Pittsboro since then. He wanted to return to The Plant to share his story in the way he knows best — through the gift of laughter.

Santos has done comedy his whole life, but he moved to New York in 2008 to truly pursue it as a career. There, he was able to meet many people in his industry, including Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson, who Santos met and worked with before Davidson was a household name.

When his daughter was born in 2012, Santos decided to move back to Connecticut to focus on a new chapter on his life, as well as figure out a new way to tell his story through comedy.

“I felt like people were hearing me, but they weren’t listening to me,” Santos said. “Years into the game, I started to change my style to be more open-ended where its almost like I am talking to you.”

Santos uses this conversational comedy to share his life experiences with his audience by taking struggles he has had to endure and turning them into something he can laugh about with others. He shares his intimate life experiences in a way where people can find joy even in the harshest of times, ranging from joking about his life experiences as a biracial American or talking about when his girlfriend found out she had cancer.

One of the comedic bits surrounding the experience of his girlfriend fighting and beating cancer focuses on the range of emotions Santos felt as a spouse watching a loved one go through one of the hardest fights. Santos uses this story to convey not only the emotions he felt then, but to also show others how he can now look back at that hard time — and make jokes about it.

“That story is stemmed from her having cancer, me being nervous and scared I’m not going to have her; me legitimately thinking about this life I may attempt to create, and then also the jealousy and the envy that I had because I wanted the attention and love she got,” Santos said. “And it all circles back to me getting the butt of the joke because it lets me know that I should not be thinking like that.”

What can people expect when they come to Saturday’s show? He said to expect a unique experience and, hopefully, an evening full of laughs.

“Laughter is definitely a factor we will be looking for,” Santos said. “But expect an experience.”

People can purchase tickets to Santos’s show on his website ­— www.robsantoscomedy.com/ — for $20. Tickets will also be available at the door for $25.

Reporter Taylor Heeden can be reached at theeden@chathamnr.com.