Twenty years may seem like a long time in any profession, but as comedy insiders will insist, it’s a snapshot in the stand-up world.
Granted, a lot of comedians never make it past year five, but if you can make your living telling jokes to drunk people, why stop?
Denver comedian Troy Baxley has been a full-time stand-up for 20 years — the operative word being “full-time.”
“I didn’t say I was a comedian after I went on for the first time,” Baxley said this week from a booth in Capitol Hill’s Lancer Lounge. “There’s way too much of that these days. That’s why 85 people go to the Comedy Works on open-mic night. They want to tell people around the water cooler that they’re comedians.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t do that until I made my living from comedy.”
Baxley’s craft will be on display Saturday during his “Mullet Mayhem” show, which celebrates his two decades in stand-up with live music and comedy from himself and Wrist Deep Productions.
“The second head shot I ever did, in the early ’90s, was me with a mullet,” Baxley said of the photo, which appears on fliers for the show. “Yep, I was sportin’ a mullet during the grunge era. Most people think it’s Photoshopped. They just can’t believe anyone still has a picture of themselves with a mullet.”
Baxley is also a writer, cartoonist and ad director for Denver’s internationally renowned humor magazine Modern Drunkard, but stand-up is his calling. His nimble, caustic humor and wickedly honest delivery have won him just about every up-and-coming or under-the-radar award across the country, from Aspen’s late U.S. Comedy Arts Festival to this year’s Great American Comedy Festival.
“If I get the ‘under the radar’ award one more time, oh man …” Baxley growled.
Baxley may be a national headliner, and he’s most certainly a comedian’s comedian — the kind that other stand-ups stay to watch from the back of the room — but the path that brought him to comedy could not have been more tangled.
After leaving his hometown of Cheyenne he worked on a shrimp boat in Texas and as a welder in Denver. He had his first comedy-club experience at Denver’s Comedy Works during the 1980s comedy boom, where he found himself wide-eyed and subconsciously mimicking the body language of the comic onstage.
“It was so far from welding,” Baxley said. “Even then I really liked the idea of it.”
Baxley’s act evolved over the years. He traveled internationally and befriended comedians, chucking props for jokes and generally operating as a self-contained unit as opposed to absorbing every bit of comedy minutiae and history that he could.
“It’s a very hard thing to do, to be yourself onstage all the time,” he said. “You see these cheerleader comics or these comedians going on autopilot sometimes and it really steams me. You can set your watch to them.”
While Baxley’s ethic and his insistence on living in Denver (as opposed to migrating to Los Angeles) might have made him less marketable to the sitcom crowd, it’s also earned him the respect of countless industry insiders and other stand-ups — plus a healthy crop of fans around the country.
“I’m one of the few comedians that’s never auditioned for ‘Last Comic Standing’ or bought Judy Carter’s ‘How to Be a Comedian’ book,” he said. “I made Comedy Works put that on their website.”
“MULLET MAYHEM.”
Comedy/music. Bender’s Tavern, 314 E. 13th Ave. Featuring stand-up from Troy Baxley and Wrist Deep Productions, and music from Babihed, Bluebelle and Booger Flinger. Saturday. 8 p.m. $12-$15. 303-861-7070 or
