Podcasters Amanda Rose and Trevin Bartee first met 10 years ago at a temporary job they both call one of their most “random”—a warehouse for a train brake repair company. They bonded over both being from small towns: Bartee is from Plattsburg, Missouri, and Rose is from Leon, Kansas (which has a population of 657 as of 2022). Both creatives, they wanted an outlet, so they decided to venture into the uber-popular realm of podcasting together.
Aiming to produce a crime podcast outside the over-saturated genre’s norm, Rose and Bartee, who recently made their debut at CrimeCon 2024, created KC-based Live, Laugh, Larceny, which they describe as a “true petty crime podcast.” The podcast is now nearly 200 episodes in and has collaborated with successful podcasts like Generation Why and And That’s Why We Drink. We talked with Rose and Bartee about having fun in the true crime genre and what’s next for Live, Laugh, Larceny.
How did the idea for the podcast come about? Rose: We both wanted to create something that nobody had done before. I’m more fascinated with true crime, and Trevin is more fascinated with comedy and satire. When you think about a true crime comedy podcast, most of the time it’s serious topics, but they’ll bring in their own humor throughout the show. We wanted to flip that around and talk about petty crimes—no murder, nothing like that—but we wanted to make it overly dramatic and humorous.
What can people expect from the podcast? Bartee: We want to make things dramatic and build a story and motives behind it. I didn’t want to talk about murder. It’s hard to be silly when you’re still ending it on a down note. We take dumb criminal stories, make them sound dramatic and do them in a deadpan, Dateline sort of way. We’re both super dramatic people, so no matter how small of a thing it is, we can blow it up. It was really natural for Amanda and I to take something as dumb as these petty crimes and build mountains out of molehills—we already do it with our own daily problems. And as long as a petty act is done, we’ll cover it in this true crime way.
What does the future look like for the podcast? Bartee: I want to work with more comedy podcasts because we have a lot of fun with crime people, but because we can play in both sandboxes—we’ve played heavily in the true crime one—my goal is to get more names in comedy [on the podcast] and get more comedy listeners. We [were] one of the only comedy podcasts to ever be at CrimeCon. When I told them we had a comedy podcast, their eyes lit up every time. It just seems like something that the world of CrimeCon is kind of missing because it has such a party atmosphere. Not only did we deserve a chance, but I think having comedy at a place like this is necessary—and it’s my goal to be the resident funny podcast of CrimeCon.
