Comic to Know: Doug Mellard, Austin's 2006 Funniest Person, Back at Cap City

Doug Mellard was born in Victoria, Texas, raised in Plano, and came to Austin for the reason most people come to Austin, which is the University of Texas, and stayed for the reason most people stay, which is that leaving would mean admitting they were done with college. In 2003, while still a student, he picked up a microphone here. Plenty of UT students pick up a microphone. Most of them are holding it at a bar at 1 a.m. and the song is by Journey.

Three years later Mellard won the 21st annual Funniest Person in Austin contest at Cap City Comedy Club, judged by a panel with people from Comedy Central, The Tonight Show and the Montreal comedy festival in it. That is the kind of jury a young comic dreams about and a defendant has nightmares about. The same year he made the televised semifinals of NBC's Last Comic Standing season 4, which is a fine show to do well on, since the title promises you'll be the last one and the network keeps making more seasons, so you never are.

From there it was Last Comic Standing again in season 6, Comedy Central's Live at Gotham in 2007, and a segment on The Jay Leno Show in 2009, which counts as a credit the way serving on the Titanic's second-to-last voyage counts as sailing experience. In 2010 he moved to Los Angeles. Austin forgave him. Austin forgives everybody who leaves, mostly because it means one more apartment opens up for somebody from California.

The work since then has been loud and proudly juvenile, and you can tell from the titles before you hear a word. Mellard has put out three albums on Stand Up! Records: Fart Safari in 2015, Fart Safari 2: Fart Harder in 2018 and Fart Safari 3: Fart Hard with a Vengeance in 2020, which went to number one on the iTunes comedy chart. A man who titles a trilogy that way is either a fool or the most honest artist in America, and I've met critics who were sure about the first part and were wrong. He's also co-hosted Wide World of Dougs with Doug Benson and ran a sports-comedy podcast, 69th Base, for 44 episodes, which is 44 more episodes than most sports podcasts deserve.

Cap City's own page quotes the Austin American-Statesman calling him "a high-energy crowd destroyer." Normally a phrase like that comes from the city's code compliance office after a fire marshal visit. Here it's a compliment, and it's the right one: Mellard is a stomp-around, all-in performer, not a guy who mumbles at a stool and lets you decide if it was a joke.

Where to see him: Wednesday, October 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the Red Room, the smaller room at Cap City Comedy Club, 11506 Century Oaks Terrace in North Austin. It's 18 and up. When we checked, early-bird seats were $8 plus a $2 fee, general admission $20 and reserved $28, each plus a $5.99 fee. Eight dollars is less than a breakfast taco costs on South Congress now, and the taco never once made the Last Comic Standing semifinals. Cap City asks general-admission groups to arrive at least 45 minutes early, and all sales are final.

It's worth the drive north to see a comic who came up in this town before the town started charging rent like it had an ocean. A city ought to keep an eye on its old contest winners, the way a family keeps an eye on the cousin who moved away: partly out of pride, and partly to see whether he's done better than the rest of us.