Emmy-nominated comedian and writer Troy Walker’s new album, “Esquire,” digs deep into his Colorado roots until he hits bedrock.
“I can do so many things that a 30-something-year-old Black dude is not supposed to be able to do,” he says before listing snowboarding, gold panning, and baking cornbread in the mountains. Having lived in L.A. since 2021, he also marvels at the legalization of psilocybin, which follows the 2014 legalization of recreational cannabis.
“What could go wrong in a state with this many bears and abandoned mines?” he asks. “Colorado’s like if your cool uncle was a state. … They should change (the state motto) to ‘Colorado: Don’t tell your parents we’ll let you do this (stuff).”
Walker is also one of a handful of Coloradans who knows what it’s like to hide backstage at an Academy Awards telecast. His boss, the Emmy-winning namesake of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” happened to be the host, and Walker and his colleagues penned the jokes Kimmel read off the teleprompter for an audience of nearly 20 million U.S. viewers.
“It’s this opportunity that came through Jimmy, who basically just uses our staff for it,” Walker said of the 2023 and 2024 ceremonies, at which he posed for red-carpet photos in his tuxedo along with the rest of Kimmel’s writer’s room. Kimmel and his staff would later get nominated for Emmys for both the 2023 telecast and the nightly talk show they produced.
“What’s grounding you is that it feels like an away game for a team, where you go on the road together,” Walker added. “You work together every day at your home field, so you only really clock how surreal it is as the show gets closer.”
Kimmel turned down the hosting gig for 2025, citing his busy schedule. And at the Sunday, March 15, telecast of the 98th Academy Awards (5 p.m. on ABC and Hulu), fellow talk-show veteran and comedian Conan O’Brien will host. (“We’ll be cheering him on,” Walker said.)
But even as Kimmel has become a lightning rod and free-speech advocate with President Trump, fighting censorship and pushing back against calls for his ouster, Walker has remained firmly in his employ. (He declined to talk about the controversies of Kimmel versus Trump, preferring not to speak for his boss or colleagues.)
Now Walker’s adding a new credit to his already Emmy-nominated résumé with on . He recorded it in 2024 at Denver’s nationally acclaimed Comedy Works — which Walker and many other comics consider to be the best stand-up club in the U.S. — but it sounds as fresh as one of Kimmel’s nightly monologues.
Walker, a South High School graduate, began performing comedy two decades ago in Denver, quickly moving up the ladder in the alternative and mainstream scenes with his savvy, profane and charming routines that profanely poked fun at his dating habits, among other topics. He gained loyal fans in cool-kid scenes, but also dominated “A-rooms,” as they’re called, including Comedy Works.
He continues to perform locally from time to time and support the scene, most recently having returned for the annual . It just happens to feel weird that he’s become one of comedy’s elder statesmen.
“It’s nice to see all the green shoots and new growth, but I’m a very sentimental person and I’m tremendously nostalgic for the old days,” he said. “Things are going well in Denver, but we used to not even think about being on TV or winning awards. It was about getting good. New York and L.A. felt so far away they might as well have been Narnia.”
Denver’s scrappiness and relative isolation prepared Walker for the highly competitive stand-up scene in L.A., where hundreds of comics weekly jockey for the same stage time. After Walker moved to L.A., he was encouraged to submit a packet of his work to Kimmel’s show after buddy Bryan Cook, a staff writer there, alerted him to an opening.
“In Colorado and the West, you have to develop material that will work in hipster warehouses and ski resorts and Wyoming biker bars, so that makes you nationally competent,” he said. “Not all scenes are like that.”
That helped him win the job on a show that requires new, topical jokes nearly every day of the year. It’s a sprint that adds up to a series of marathons, he said. But he’s suited to the pace, feels a strong camaraderie with his co-writers, and can produce jokes faster than ever now.
“It helps that creative part of things to not feel like you’re writing at gunpoint,” he said. “Like I said, it’s a team effort, and we all want to do well.”
The punchlines of his first-ever stand-up album, “Esquire,” bear Walker’s honed humor and performance style. He’s conversational with a touch of bemusement, apoplexy and intellect, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows him. Walker holds a law degree from the University of Denver’s Sturm College, and worked at a bank when he moved to L.A.
So how does that inform “Esquire” jokes about racist magicians (“Ku Klux Kadabra”) and porn plotlines, old-school drink names and dating rules, or culture shock in Paris? Walker sees a direct line from those to his early days performing at dive bars on East Colfax Avenue — specifically, the scrappy comedy nights at the Squire Lounge, where Denver’s alt-comedy scene came into its own in the late 2000s.
“It sounds cheesy, but sometimes at the Emmys or an Oscar party or something, I’ll think about how crazy it is that I find myself here because I used to go hang and perform at the Squire,” he said. “The grossest, (crappiest) dive bar on the worst street in Denver, Colorado. I’m so grateful for it. But it’s still pretty wild.”
