A well-known figure on the vaudeville stage, Roberts performed in a variety of acts over the years. Working as part of Moreland, Thompson, and Roberts with Charles A Moreland, and Minnie May Thompson, the group was advertised as "the best dressed act in vaudeville."
    Standing 6-foot-3, "Big Joe" later toured the country for a number of years as part of the trio Roberts, Hays and Roberts. Calling themselves “The Big Three”,  the act was comprised of Joe and his wife Lillian along with partner Ed Hayes.  
     During the 1901-02 season, they began to ascend the vaudeville ladder with a “side-splitting” skit called “The Infant”.  With Joe dressed in a ridiculous outfit of a boy, the show was reviewed as one of the cleverest acts in vaudeville.

In 1914, Roberts and his wife teamed with Johnnie McGowan, for another tour of "On the Road."  McGowan was renowned as a singer, performing "You Were Made to Love" and "You Have Something I Want."   (He would later go on to a long career as an actor, singer and playwright).

     Following the unexpected death of his first wife, Roberts remarried Nina Straw (Shannon), and the couple toured the Orpheum Circuit, billing themselves as "The Pint and Quart of Show Business" to play up their physical difference in size. They continued to summer in Bluffton.
     In 1920, Roberts followed Buster Keaton to Hollywood, and joined the Keaton film company.  Keaton biographer Rudy Blesh noted that "Big Joe" appeared "with Buster three years, in every film from the second one on, twenty films in all". He also appeared in The Primitive Lover, with Constance Talmadge, a  romantic comedy released in May of 1922, and The Misfit, starring Australian comedian Clyde Cook.  The film was released as Under Orders by Educational Pictures on March 23, 1924.

     Roberts died shortly after the filming of Keaton's feature Our Hospitality.     "Buster had lost one-third of an image one of the three Big Joes in his life.  With Joe Keaton, and Joe Schenck, Joe Roberts had made up a kind of tripartitepaternal figure upon which he had come to rely," stated Rudi Blesh in his biography on Keaton.
     Press reports indicated that Roberts died from a heart attack.  Other reports indicated he had suffered a stroke.
     Following Joe's death, Nina remained in Los Angeles and worked as a secretary for one the studios.