Steve Treviño saw one of his early comedy specials show up on Netflix a decade ago, but that hour, Relatable, originally debuted on NUVOtv, which isn’t even a cable channel any longer because so much has changed in TV since 2014. But Treviño remains as relatable as he did then, which means his sixth and newest stand-up special represents his formal debut as a Netflix comedian. He’s the latest in a increasingly long line of guys who had to prove themselves as draws on YouTube to get Netflix’s attention. He won’t have to work as hard to prove himself to you, though, most likely.
The Gist: Comedy nerds might recall that Treviño, a writer on Comedy Central’s Mind of Mencia, would later help expose Carlos Mencia for joke theft on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast back in 2010.
Treviño would slowly emerge on his own, releasing his first special on Showtime in 2012 (Grandpa Joe’s Son), followed two years later by Relatable. His third and fourth specials he uploaded through Amazon, and his fifth, I Speak Wife, he self-released on YouTube in October 2022. I Speak Wife has racked up more than 4.8 million views since. In the midst of that, Treviño also appeared on Max as part of the 2nd Annual Ha Festival: The Art of Comedy showcase, which filmed in San Antonio, only a few blocks from where he filmed this hour for Netflix. In this new set, Treviño jokes about living a Type-A Virgo wife (she even directs this special!), waxes nostalgic about how they met, how his relationship with his dad has changed since he was a kid, and how he’s trying to raise his own kids now.
Memorable Jokes: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. He’s a guy in his 40s who didn’t grow up rich or poor, and wants to raise his kids like he was raised. He coaches Little League and likes to watch football while eating chips straight out of the bag and pizza straight out of the box. A real manly man. But his wife rules the roost. And his kids make him melt.
Yes, he’s a conventional network multi-cam sitcom dad. He even refers to his wife onstage as “Captain Evil” but his jokes tend to focus more on how much unnecessary extra work she puts in to control situations, only for her to get frustrated by how much work she has made for herself in the process. Because while he may be the titular “Simple Man,” she is anything but. Which eventually leads him to warn the married fellas in the audience not to look at their wives while laughing at this jokes, lest they get into trouble, too. Unless you’ve been married a long time; then you’re safe. As he says of older couples: “You wait for a lot of years to go by, and you’re both out of options.”
Treviño enjoys recounting for us how he and his wife grew up together in the same small town in south Texas, and how despite moving away to the opposite coasts, it was her father who unwittingly brought them together as a couple.
Now that they raising kids, he also realizes how much simpler he had it as a kid, waxing nostalgic about how he could only watch cartoons on Saturday mornings, not having them on demand on a tablet, nor having TikTok and Instagram to occupy his time. His kids won’t know what it’s like rolling around in the back of a beat-up pickup truck, or sitting on the floor talking to a first crush on a shared landline, or even understand the hand motion for rolling down a car window. But none of that is going to stop him from becoming a total Girl Dad himself while remaining tougher on his son. Even if that makes it more difficult for his daughter to find a good, simple man herself when she grows up. Why? He jokes: “I reserve the right to ruin some man’s life, too, someday.”
Our Take: Treviño clearly knows that even after multiple specials, he still finds himself in a position of having to reintroduce himself both to Netflix subscribers and even to the people in the room in San Antonio. “Those of you that are new to me and don’t know what I do, my show is comedy/cry for help,” he says in the opening minutes.
He then follows that up with a more succinct tag line: “I’m a family man. I’m a simple man. I live my life with my family. They do dumb shit, and I come and report.”
So even when he gives in to the temptations of contemporary comedy and complicates one bit by saying “before you cancel me,” he’s covering up for the fact that he just did an act-out of a gay Little Leaguer he coaches and jokes about the boy’s future relationship with balls, because while it fits within his pitch as an observational comedian, it’s out of place and out of step with the rest of his hour which focuses on his own family life. He claims he only did that bit to illustrate his problem with other parents not seeing what he sees.
Because he’d rather be nostalgic than problematic himself.
One of his big applause breaks follows a mini-monologue in this vein, comparing kids these days with his generation: “They watch TikTok and they think, ‘Oh, the American dream is fancy cars, fancy boats and fancy clothes and fancy houses.’ Man, that’s not the American dream. My grandparents did not come to this country for fancy things. They came to this country ‘cause they wanted a roof over their head, a job, and they wanted to put food in their families’ bellies. And they wanted to make their own decisions for their family and have a little bit of freedom. That’s the American dream. Nothing else. Nothing else.”
I mean, you could dream a little bigger, couldn’t you? That’s not what this comedian offers, though. Treviño instead delivers a workmanlike performance, and your enjoyment of it might entirely depend upon whether you’re married with kids — there’s a reason this kind of comedian routinely got network sitcom deals, because there’s always going to be an audience for this. It almost makes too much sense, then, to realize at the end that his own wife would direct his special, too.
Our Call: STREAM IT. At the end, Treviño dedicates this special to the “hard workers” of America, and when you stop to think about it, if you’re the type of person who really does work hard and is trying to make ends meet, then you don’t have much time for much else and so you just want someone to remind you that you’re not alone with comedy that goes down easy and relatable, and for that, this is your guy.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.