There are many conventions across the nation that cater to comics, anime, and cosplay, but none quite compare to DreamCon. The RDC-founded convention, which had a small upstart in Austin, Texas in 2018, has since grown exponentially. According to DreamCon, the 2026 iteration sold over 45,000 tickets, bringing thousands from near and far to join the community of pop culture, sports, gaming, and anime.

Now relocated to Houston, the conference is outfitted with programming that includes panel discussions and firesides, gaming lounges, wrestling matches, and cast reunions from cult-classic shows such as Power Rangers. Not to mention Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center was floating with celebrities from all different pockets of Hollywood — think Issa Rae, Cree Summer, Wale, Khleo Thomas, and even Noah Lyles. Conversations spanned cosplay, cartoon characters and their imagined Black ancestry, how to get into voice acting, and creators making the transition from social media to streaming.

The latter manifested in a panel with comedians and creators Jahdai “Bigg Jah” Pickett and Kevin “KevOnStage” Fredericks. Alongside VP of Creator Partnerships at Tubi, Hudzi Chihumbu, and moderated by Hendale King, the CFO and Head of Partnerships at DreamCon, the discussion touched on the journey from creating on social media to building the platforms that eventually launched their own shows. 

It’s a question he’s been answering with his life since he was 13 years old, long before he ever picked up a camera. Pickett grew up in South Central Los Angeles. As a preteen, his mother shipped him off to San Diego to keep him safe. What followed reads less like a comedian’s origin story than a highlight reel from an entirely different life: a Pac-10 defensive line spot at UC Berkeley, catching passes from Aaron Rodgers on the practice squad, backing up Andre Carter and pledging Omega Psi Phi along the way. When the NFL didn’t pan out, Pickett didn’t slow down — he played arena ball in Odessa, Texas, subbed in South Central classrooms, and worked security on tour until he committed to content full-time in 2017.

The instinct to keep moving, he says, traces back to his parents — and to two very different ideas of what he owed himself.

“My father, I’ll start there. My mom too. My mom went to college, my dad didn’t. My dad was a barber and an artist,” Pickett says. “He pushed for education. At the same time, he also pushed for individualism and creativity. So my dad was a hippie, you know what I’m saying? My mom wanted me to go to Morris Brown or Morehouse or an HBCU, something like that — she wanted me to be a doctor, a professor, a teacher. My dad was like, ‘You be what you want to be. As long as you get there, get your education, then you can decide what you want to do. But as long as you can provide for yourself and the family that you plan on having, you’d be good.’ So he never put the pressure on me to have to be a lawyer or a doctor, but he did put the pressure on you got to be educated for sure.”

Even after Berkeley, the plan wasn’t to become an internet comedian. It was to get hired — and Pickett had the credentials for it.

“I remember telling you guys at the beginning that I was trying to get a job in my field. I went to school for this — I graduated with a film degree,” Pickett says. “So my goal was to work in the film industry. And that didn’t happen. It probably would’ve still happened eventually if I would’ve kept applying and kept interviewing for different jobs, but it didn’t happen in the fashion that I wanted it to, so I started making my own stuff.”

One memory in particular still sticks with him: pitching original sketches to a production company that laughed at the material in the room — and passed anyway. “It was funny to them. They still said no. It’s crazy.” he says. “I took those same sketches a year later and did it myself, and became a viral creator with the content I was trying to sell to them.”

None of that has been reported anywhere before now, and it shows up in his work whether or not the audience clocks it. Pickett writes, directs, and stars in nearly everything he makes, under a style he’s branded “hood good comedy” — relatable, episodic sketch content rooted in everyday Black life, delivered with the timing of someone who’s actually lived the material. He was one of the earliest comedians to build a real audience on YouTube and TikTok, and that early bet has compounded into nearly 8 million followers across platforms: 4.3 million on Facebook, 1.89 million on YouTube, 919,000 on TikTok, 800,000 on Instagram. Sketch-turned-series shows like The Lesbian Homie and My Roommate Pays All The Bills became genuine hits, pulling nearly 40 million views combined across their YouTube and streaming runs — enough to catch Tubi’s attention early and turn his current series into a full-blown franchise on the platform, now one of its top-performing creator shows.

The material draws from everywhere he’s been, not just where he’s from. “I feel like all the different things in my life, the aspects, the experiences from being born in San Diego, being raised in Los Angeles, and then going to college in the Bay Area — those three places are very unique, all in California, all West Coast, but three different types of West Coast,” Pickett says. “And then coming back home to LA to pursue this career and bring all my experiences from all the different things I’ve done, from teaching to bodyguard work to — I was a personal trainer for years at one point in time — bringing that all into my comedy. All my experiences kind of make up what I do.” On filmmaking specifically, he points to two names: “F. Gary Gray, John Singleton are my biggest influences as far as filmmakers from the West. I’m from South Central LA, and I had a rough upbringing, but I look back now and I can make fun of it now because I survived.”

In a full circle moment during their panel, the two of them shared that when they were at the start of their comedy careers, Pickett and Fredericks actually met and knew each other, crossing paths long before they would reconnect creating comedy for Tubi. 

Fredericks, who goes by KevOnStage, arrived at Tubi from a similar place, if a different route. He spent more than a decade building his own following through observational comedy rooted in faith, family, and everyday Black life, racking up hundreds of millions of cumulative views before television came calling on its own terms — first with the BET+ comedy drama Churchy, co-created with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company, then A Black Lady Sketch Show, hosting duties on Will Smith’s Dads Just Don’t Understand, and a New York Times bestseller, all while he kept headlining stand-up tours he produced himself. Fredericks has said the concept translates well: it’s easier to bring an already-cemented social media audience over to a new platform than to build one from scratch. It’s the same math Pickett is running now, just from further back in the count. 

That math is exactly what Tubi bet on when it launched Tubi for Creators in June 2025 — a program built to give digital-first talent a pathway to Hollywood without asking them to sand down what made their audiences show up in the first place. Digital-first creator content on the Fox Corporation-owned platform has since grown to over 20,000 episodes from more than 300 creators, and both Pickett and Fredericks were part of Tubi’s first exclusive creator slate.

For Pickett, DreamCon marked the next step in that bet. He used the platform to announce a new slate of his own: L.A.U.G.H. Houston, a series following a wild mix of Houston locals navigating relationships, hustles, family drama, and everyday chaos, where every bad decision and hood scheme turns into a punchline; Bigg Jah Presents: The Whole Crew Is Stupid, a live comedy showcase curated by Pickett and his Dirty Chucks Entertainment team, bringing together rising and established digital comedians for a night of stand-up, sketches, and crowd interaction built specifically for the DreamCon audience; and Bigg Homies, his first feature film — the story of a feared but lovable neighborhood enforcer who’s forced to grow up fast when his family home faces foreclosure, sending him on a chaotic mission through the streets of LA alongside his dysfunctional homies and an unforgettable cast of characters.

Even the silliest of those titles carries a bit of his father’s old lesson about education tucked inside it. “Even though I do a lot of silly stuff, I try to put some type of lesson inside my comedy,” Pickett says. “If it’s dealing with relationships, if it’s dealing with words and being able to read — The Whole Crew Is Stupid, it’s based off that. Just the English language.”

Asked whether any of this — the slate, the platform, the audience nearly a decade in the making — feels validating now that Hollywood has finally caught up to what he was doing on his own, Pickett doesn’t hesitate. “Yes, of course,” he says. Had that early production company said yes instead of laughing him out of the room, he adds, none of this would exist in the form it does now. “I would’ve been an employee there, writing for them and for their platform, as opposed to building my own platform. So it’s definitely gratifying. I feel like God works in mysterious ways, and he’s the reason why I’m here. Because if I would’ve got that job, I would’ve went hard for their company as opposed to building my own.”

Onstage, neither Pickett nor Fredericks dwelled much on the mechanics of the deals themselves. What came through instead was closer to emotional math — what it means to build an audience with no gatekeepers, and then decide which gates are actually worth walking through once they finally open. For both men, the answer has looked less like leaving the internet that made them behind and more like translating it: taking a built-in audience, a specific comedic voice, and a body of work already proven at scale, and handing it a bigger stage without losing what made it work in the first place.

That, more than any single deal or panel, is the story DreamCon’s programming kept circling back to all weekend — that the pipeline from phone camera to Hollywood soundstage isn’t hypothetical anymore. For Bigg Jah, it’s already running through major cities, including Houston.