Comic to Know: Trey Galyon, the Austin-Made Anti-Hero Coming Home to the Velv

Every comedy town produces two kinds of alumni: the ones who leave and get famous, and the ones who leave and get good. The second kind pays worse but ages better, like a pickup truck or a grudge. Trey Galyon is the second kind. He started doing stand-up in Austin in 2000, became what his bio calls a fixture on the scene, made the finals of Cap City's Funniest Person in Austin contest more than once, and got tagged by the Austin Chronicle as an "Anti Hero of Comedy," which is the kind of compliment you can only get in a town that still had a weekly paper willing to hand them out.

The résumé from those years reads like a box of old ticket stubs. His bio says he worked with Ron White, George Lopez, Greg Giraldo and Mitch Hedberg, played Showtime's Latino Laff Festival three years running, and took to the Midwest club circuit, which is where comics go to learn that a Tuesday in a hotel bar is still a Tuesday. In a 2021 interview with Trainwreck'd Society, he said his first paid gig was opening at the River Center Comedy Club in San Antonio, because Cap City's owners also ran that room and sent Austin comics down I-35 the way a farmer sends calves to a cousin. He also said his home club was usually the last to book him for money. That is the oldest arrangement in show business: the hometown claps first and pays last.

In 2008 he moved to New York, where he has kept what his site calls an underground following, which in New York means people who know your name and also know a guy who knows a better bar. If you listen to podcasts you've probably heard him already: he's a repeat guest on Doug Benson's Doug Loves Movies, turned up on the web series Getting Doug With High, and co-hosted the movie podcast Ruff Drafts with Geoff Tate and Troy Tate. His album, Trey Galyon Live at Creep Records, came out in 2019 on the Creep Records label.

Here is the part that ought to sting a little. Galyon left Austin to go where the comedy industry was. Then, some years later, a whole wing of the comedy industry packed up and moved to Austin, bringing podcast studios, private security and a fondness for no state income tax. So the town he left for being too small is now so big that a guy from Los Angeles can open a club on Sixth Street and get treated like he discovered the river. Galyon got here first and was early, which in comedy is the same as being wrong, only with better stories.

The room he's coming back to has been doing this longer than most of the newcomers have been doing anything. The Velveeta Room opened in 1988, when Esther's Follies owners Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton took over the lease on a former Sixth Street strip club, kept the pole on the stage and gave their cast a place to try stand-up. It now sits at 521 E. Sixth Street, next door to Esther's Follies, and its old slogan was "Where Comedy Grows." It's a fitting stop for a comic it helped grow, even if he had to leave the state to finish ripening.

The practical part: Friday, November 6, 8 PM show, doors at 7:30, at the Velveeta Room. General admission is $20 plus a $2.25 service charge; reserved front row is $25 plus $2.50, and there are only a handful of those, so if you like being looked at by a comedian, move quickly. The Velv doesn't do refunds, only credit for a future show, so treat the purchase like a marriage proposal and mean it. A man can go home again, it turns out. He just has to buy a ticket like everybody else.