Laura Swisher

After being described by LA Weekly as “cute,” television personality and comedian Laura Swisher realized she had finally broken through an important barrier. “As an artist and as a woman,” says Laura. “It’s deeply fulfilling when a television critic sees past your innate creativity and notices your outside beauty. Too often in this industry women are only seen as ‘funny’ or ‘important,’ so it’s refreshing to finally be taken seriously for my looks.” Nevertheless, when offered the chance to pose for Playboy for a “Women of Tech TV” spread, she turned the magazine down. “I wanted to hold out for a magazine noted for its articles, like ‘Maxim’ or ‘FHM’.”
Laura got her start as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles after giving up a rewarding career as a publicist. “Working in PR definitely filled a void in my life,” she explains. “There’s no greater satisfaction in life than surrounding oneself with C-list actors at corporate-sponsored events, secure in the knowledge that at least one newspaper will run a blurb about it. And yet, it wasn’t enough for me.”
Within a year of quitting PR, she landed her first TV appearance on “Destination Stardom,” a variety show on the wildly-popular Pax network. Her dry, laid-back persona and trenchant fart jokes caught the industry’s attention. Soon after that she was invited to the Chicago Comedy Festival, where a lot of important people gave her business cards. Other shows followed, including Comedy Central’s “Premium Blend”, NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” where she was a semi-finalist in its first season, and Oxygen’s “Girls Behaving Badly.”
A failed “Card Sharks” audition ultimately led her to co-host the national late night talk show “Unscrewed…with Martin Sargent” on Tech TV (and then G4). “Unscrewed” has been described as a cross between “The Late Show with David Letterman” and Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” due to its peculiar blending of comedy and Internet crackpots. Laura became one of the show’s writers as well, and produced and starred in weekly segments.
Since “Unscrewed” was cancelled, Laura has appeared over half a dozen times on VH-1 as a commentator (“40 Dumbest Celebrity Quotes”, “Web Junk: Best of 2007” and others) and as a regular contributor to “Dailies” on The Reelz Channel, doing red carpet work, field pieces and in-studio interviews. In addition to working in front of the camera, she’s also been honing her skills as a writer and producer. For the Mark Burnett reality show “Gold Rush,” which was hosted by “Entertainment Tonight’s” Mark Steines, she wrote, produced and hosted segments for “Gold Rush Central”. Most recently Laura created original content for TV.com, the largest TV-related social networking site on the planet. As the “face” of TV.com, she wrote and hosted the daily show “TurboVision”, the weekly “Burning Question” and served as producer and talent for celebrity interviews.
She currently resides in Los Angeles.