Comedian Petey Smith-McDowell reels in the laughs

Have you ever pondered the connection between Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and the Asheville City Council’s position on new hotels?

Maybe you haven’t — but local comedian and meme-maker extraordinaire Petey Smith-McDowell certainly has. 

Over the past four years, Smith-McDowell has been parlaying his seemingly limitless knowledge of Asheville’s quirks and American pop culture into an Instagram meme account — @peteysmithmcdowell — that’s become a must-follow for Asheville residents and comedy fans around the country. Every day, followers open up their apps to find his absurdist takes on topics both general (the Pritchard Park drum circle, hotels, downtown parking fees, the French Broad River, North Carolina) and niche (Ingles gas station points, the Guitar Guy, how to pronounce Leicester, life coaches, Asheville’s unique flavor of freaky white people, Short Coxe Avenue and, of course, boil water advisories). 

The 35-year-old Asheville native and co-producer of Disclaimer Comedy, a popular weekly open mic at Asheville Music Hall, has been performing stand-up for 16 years. But he credits his off-the-wall Instagram account, with its more than 12,000 followers — putting him in the top 20% of accounts by following, according to 2023 data from Statista — for boosting his profile to new, career-impacting heights. In a sign of his rising status, he was voted “Best Asheville Comedian” in this paper’s 2024 Best of WNC awards. Also, in the summer of 2023, one of his posts earned a like from Hollywood actor and former Asheville resident Andie MacDowell.

Getting reel

Regardless of its target, each of Smith-McDowell’s Instagram posts or reels — short clips that can include video, text, cartoons or animated gifs — has the winning combination of deep insider knowledge and perfectly apt pop-culture references. 

His most popular reel to date, a December 2023 post about the North Carolina fast-food chain Cook Out, is a clip of NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning reciting a surreal chunk of play-calling jargon (“explode to gun double right-flip zebra scat left-Y drag-X hook F trail alert 52 sprint draw easy on two on two ready break”) alongside the caption, supplied by Smith-McDowell: “How people from North Carolina order their food from Cook-Out.” His posts and reels regularly get hundreds of likes, but this one earned 1.5 million views, 62,200 likes and 76,600 shares. In late October, a 10-slide post stuffed full of memes about Tropical Storm Helene earned 133,000 views. 

It was The Rock’s turn to appear last March, in a reel Smith-McDowell made in response to an Asheville Citizen Times article announcing yet another planned hotel. Next to a caption reading “Asheville city council adding another hotel,” there’s a video sticker of the A-list actor and former wrestler performing one of his famous WWE minimonologues: “But regardless whether you like or you don’t like it, you love it, you hate it, one thing for damn sure: You are gonna respect it.”

Scrolling through one post after another, @peteysmithmcdowell starts to feel like a bizarro-world game of free association filtered through the mind of a millennial mad scientist whose tools are snippets of “Clarissa Explains It All,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” and other bits of cable TV bric-a-brac. The result is a postmodern media mashup that’s as out there as it is cutting.

“I kind of look at it as like the old-school political cartoons, where they would summarize an entire idea just in pictures,” says Cary Goff, a longtime comedy collaborator of Smith-McDowell’s and co-producer, along with Smith-McDowell and two others, of Disclaimer Comedy. 

The Rock reel, for example, is funny and weird, but it also articulates — fairly or unfairly — a commonly voiced frustration that the city government isn’t doing enough to limit the construction of new hotels.

“I think they’re just intensely relatable,” says comedian Cayla Clark, host of the Blind Date Live dating show and an Asheville Instagram auteur in her own right. “[Petey] really knows all of the different demographics very well and is extremely observant. So he’s able to kind of poke fun at all the different demographics in Asheville, like the crystal girls.”

Dropping anchor

Like so many other brilliant ideas, it all started during a late night at the Asheville Yacht Club. 

In 2020, Smith-McDowell was working the door. After his shift, he often stuck around, as much for the food and drinks as for the opportunity to witness the various human dramas that would play out at the popular downtown bar. 

“It felt like the underbelly of the city. … Like [I was] a wizard in a bar with other weird people in the Harry Potter world,” he says. He would text jokes about things he witnessed to his friend and Yacht Club manager at the time, Amanda Kuykendall, and her partner. 

At Kuykendall’s suggestion, Smith-McDowell decided to post a meme about late-night Yacht Club shenanigans to Instagram and tag her. (It was made under a different account, @petey_parker, which he had created to help promote a new show he was hosting at the time, Petey’s Playhouse Comedy Showcase.)

As it turned out, Kuykendall wasn’t the only one who appreciated his takes. “[There’d] be like one Asheville meme for every 17 posts, but it’d get a lot of feedback,” he says. 

He worked his way up to 1,200 followers, a modest but not unimpressive figure. Any momentum that was building, however, was stopped in its tracks when his account was hijacked by Nigerian scammers. (Yes, you read that right.)

It took weeks of Smith-McDowell and his friends making daily reports to Instagram for the account to be restored. In the meantime, he started giving more thought to the kind of social media presence he wanted to have. When he happened to overhear two fellow comics, Hilliary Begley and Chanel Ali, discussing their comedy brands, a light switched on. 

“Chanel was looking at her [and says], ‘You can’t be the queen of Asheville.’ And my dumb brain was like, ‘I can be the queen of Asheville,’” he says.

He decided to shift to Asheville-centric humor and see how far he could take it, through another (nonhijacked) account he owned, @peteysmithmcdowell. “It’s a niche on a niche on a niche on a niche thing,” he says. But it’s one he’s come to own. 

Serious work

Smith-McDowell traces the beginning of his career to his time attending A-B Tech. As part of his coursework in the drama department, he wound up taking a class on public speaking. In the process of preparing for his presentations, he accidentally got a crash course on the essential elements of comedy: tone, voice, audience and the like. “Basically, how to read a room,” he says.

In 2014 he moved to New York City to try to make it in the sitcom world. He worked for NBC as part of a program that recruited young writers to make pilots; none of the shows he worked on were made, though he did contribute to an earlier version of “Kenan,” the sitcom starring “Saturday Night Live” veteran Kenan Thompson. 

But he missed home. When his father had a heart attack, Smith-McDowell came back to town to help and decided to stick around for good.

In person, Smith-McDowell is much lower key than his madcap Instagram posts — almost deadpan. His laid-back demeanor and the playful content he creates, however, mask a serious work ethic. He says he averages three to four posts a week, each with roughly 10 slides; in total, that comes out to 30-40 memes a week. That’s a lot of creative effort.

As more and more comedians have taken to social media to build a fanbase, the field has grown exponentially more crowded — and attention has become that much harder to wrangle. To get a sense of scale, according to the social media management company Hootsuite, “694,000 reels are shared by DM [direct message] every minute.” 

 “Petey’s got to come up with funny stuff daily almost,” says Goff. “That’s part of the reason why I can’t deal with social media. I just don’t have the time to create that much content to build up a following.” 

Though he’s been doing comedy since he was 19, Smith-McDowell says he can detect a noticeable shift in his opportunities since he began meming regularly. This includes opening for comedian Hannibal Buress on several occasions (among other national names) and invitations to perform in cities outside Asheville. This year he’s hoping to leverage his growing popularity into a live clip show based off his memes.

Smith-McDowell is certainly enjoying his newfound success. But he says one of the coolest parts of his digital act is the number of unexpected connections he’s made offline, such as when fans come up to him after shows and mention that they discovered him through his Instagram. He likes to compare himself to “a Young Frankenstein”: “I just create a monster and see what townsfolk it brings back.”

Follow Petey Smith-McDowell on Instagram at @peteysmithmcdowell or find him at 8 p.m. Wednesdays at the Disclaimer Comedy open mic at Asheville Music Hall, 31 Patton Ave.