Comic’s act driven by love for and annoyance with wife
Comedian Steve Treviño has been asked from time to time about doing a podcast, but he always said no.
The pandemic changed that. “I found myself sitting at home, doing nothing, dealing with depression and anxiety,” he said, noting that it was the first time in 20 years that he wasn’t spending six nights a week performing.
His wife, Renae — whom he often talks about in his act, sometimes referring to her as Captain Evil — suggested that they find something to do that would help lift him out of that dark head space. So they started doing weekly Facebook Live sessions together, which eventually led to the podcast “Steve Treviño and Captain Evil.”
“The wife and I are having a great time doing it,” he said. “It’s almost a little hour of therapy for us. I tell people what we’ve learned from it is that if you argue in front of the public, you hear each other and you’re nice to each other in the argument.”
The couple has kept the podcast going as clubs have started reopening and he’s gotten back onstage —he’ll be at the LOL Comedy Club in San Antonio this weekend — and Treviño thinks the podcast will continue beyond the pandemic, too.
“For me, it’s a commercial, and the more eyeballs I can get, the more people become fans, and I can continue to live this boyhood dream of mine,” said Treviño, who grew up in the Gregory-portland area near Corpus Christi and lives in New Braunfels. “Renae and I are really enjoying it, and it has been successful fairly quickly. We were able to monetize it.
“And I honestly think it has helped our relationship. Some
people go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you said that to her!’ It’s our real relationship. We try to be an open book.”
The shows he is doing now for his “I Speak Wife” tour blends material he was performing right before clubs closed because of the pandemic as well as newer stuff he developed in the past few months. He shaped some of his coronavirus jokes into “My Life in Quarantine,” a very funny special he filmed in front of a masked, socially distanced audience outdoors at Canyon Lake.
The special includes a recording of the podcast featuring Treviño’s wife, his mother and his father-in-law. His son pops up in the special, too, sporting a jazzy little bow tie and telling a series of jokes he learned from his grandfather.
“I hope he outgrows it,” Treviño said. “I hope he learns to play the guitar or falls in love with math. But for now, we try to encourage anything that he’s into.”
Showcasing his family in his act and in the podcast also has another level to it, he said.
“There’s Mexican Americans in this country that don’t work at Home Depot and aren’t the gardener,” he said. “Here’s this Mexican American family onstage performing.
“It was always very important to me because other comedians who are Mexican American tend to spend a lot of time making fun of our race. I also started to notice the only Mexican Americans that were getting HBO specials were from Los Angeles, and I had a very different point of view than what they were putting out there.”
He said he wants to see Mexican Americans represented on TV as “American, regular people.”
“My father-in-law, a Mexican American, retired with the post office. My mother-in-law is a business owner,” he said. “My dad is a pipe fitter, a welder, a Vietnam vet. And I had both my parents and we were not on welfare. The urban experience was not my experience.”
His relationship with Renae, whom he married in 2011 after they’d been together for seven years, is central to everything in his life, including his act. When she got pregnant with their second child, he talked about it onstage. And when she miscarried, he thought it was important to talk about that, too, and he does in “My Life in Quarantine.”
“I had to, because it really broke my wife, which, in turn, broke me,” he said. “And once it happened to us, several people reached out and said, ‘We’ve been through that, too, and nobody talks about it.’ I would have felt a lot better to know it happens and it’s actually quite common, but nobody talks about it.”
The special also reveals that Renae is pregnant again. The couple is expecting a daughter — he jokes in the show about naming her Quarantina — before the end of the year.
The couple’s affection for one another comes across in the special and in their podcast. And that’s exactly what Treviño is going for.
“I’m madly in love with my wife, and I hope it shows, even though she wears me out and I get super frustrated,” he said. “If you watch my act, you’ll see that she always wins. She’s always making me do things I don’t want to do. I do them because I love her.”