For a cool four years, Adam Conover loved ruining everything. And boy, was he good at it. But as he makes his way from the screen back to the stand-up stage, he’s looking to bring things in a bit of a different direction in the midst of rekindling the flame for his first love: Stand-up comedy.
Making his way to Boston’s Seaport for a three-night, five-show run at Laugh Boston starting on Thursday (July 21), Conover will continue to bring along the infectious curiosity and snarky personality that made him a household name to begin with, but instead of pelting his audience with a well of uncovered facts and figures, he’ll be taking a deep dive into what has made him tick as a person throughout his life whilst focusing on a number of topics surrounding ADHD and the modern-day attention span.
Before he makes his way to the city this week, Vanyaland had the chance to connect with Conover to talk about his return to stand-up and pulling back the curtain on the caricature personality displayed on Adam Ruins Everything, as well as his lifelong love of the Red Sox (even while growing up on Long Island), and what it was like working side by side with President Barack Obama on his latest on-screen endeavor, Netflix’s The G Word.
Check it out.
Jason Greenough: It’s exciting seeing you come to Boston, Adam, and I’m glad we could connect to chat about it. With that being said, you’ve got five shows coming up at Laugh Boston. Just starting off, what’s the overall feeling as you make your way to the city?
Adam Conover: I’m incredibly excited. I couldn’t be more excited. I mean, this is my first tour on the road since 2019, and I’m so happy to get back to doing stand-up. I was going stir crazy in my home, bothering my girlfriend and my dog with stand-up premises. Stand-up is what I got in the business to do, and it’s my first love as a comedian. I’m one of those people where, when I first started doing television, I thought that the paycheck was nice, but I really did it because I thought it would make it easier to get booked on stand-up shows.
The experience of doing live stand-up for an audience, there’s nothing better in the world. I have a brand new hour of stand-up that I am touring for the first time, with a loose title of “Pay Attention,” where I talk about ADHD and my own diagnosis with ADD as a kid, the attention economy, TikTok and all the apps that are sucking our attention away from us. It’s also a show that’s just about stand-up comedy itself, and I’m really proud of it. I’m still working on it while I’m on the road, and it’s still evolving, but it’s a very personal show where I talk about my childhood and my own experiences doing comedy, and being a person in the world, and I think it’ll be very different from what people have seen before.
I love that. I appreciate the enthusiasm for it, and the amount of thought that you’ve put into it, as well. From the viewer’s perspective, your work has always had that quality, but with this being a new stand-up show and something you’ve never done before at this level, how are you feeling about it? Is that aspect of it making you nervous, or adding any sort of pressure or extra emotion?
Honestly, no. It’s a feeling of relief to be out there again after the pandemic. Every time I go up on stage, I feel like I’m releasing a pressure valve that I, and everyone else needs to release. I think people are really excited to be in clubs, laughing together again. It’s really a powerful experience, and there’s no negative pressure at all. It’s been very positive, and almost revelatory to be able to do it.
If memory serves me, you’ve been to Boston in the past, but it has been a little while.
Right. I did the Women in Comedy Festival years ago, and then I had a Boston show scheduled for 2019, but we had to cancel and couldn’t reschedule before the pandemic. So this visit is kind of like me doing right by Boston, where that 2019 date was one show, and now I’m doing five shows to make up for it. [laughs] I do believe this is my first time headlining in Boston, though.
Right on! That’s a reason to celebrate in and of itself. Now, you sparked something for me when you brought up the five shows. With these shows and the topics you want to cover, what can audiences expect? Five different shows? Or is the plan to play with some stuff here and there but keep the same general structure throughout?
Well, I think if you go to see any stand-up comic do five shows in a weekend, you’re going to see mostly the same show with some improvising, crowd, etc.
It takes a long time to develop material, and I’d be impressed to see anyone do five different hours over the course of a weekend. However, I am in the stage where I record every set, play it back, take things out, write new bits, and put things back, so I would expect a good ten percent of the show to change each time, but the solid core of it will stay the same. That being said, I’m always working on different performance angles, and finding different ways to get the crowd involved. That’s always a big part of the show for me.
In the past, I’ve done shows that felt more like a one-man show, but this show is straight stand-up. I do have a theme, and topics that I move through to make a point, but this is a stand-up comedy show that is designed to make you laugh as often and as hard as possible. It’s not a Fringe-type one-man show. At least not yet. Maybe eventually I’ll evolve into that format, but one of the things I was really excited about for this show is, in the past I’ve done shows that I used a PowerPoint presentation and gave it an Adam Ruins Everything feel, like the elections special I did in 2016. My last show, Mind Parasites Live was in that format, too, but with this show, I wanted to go out and do a straight stand-up show that works in comedy clubs, and works there first.
It’s always good to let the people know what they’re in for, for sure. Now, aside from the shows, what are you looking forward to most about coming to Boston and taking in the experience in the city after all this time away?
I have some college friends in Boston that I haven’t seen in many years, and I can’t wait to see them again. However, I know that the Red Sox are in town for the weekend, and I was raised a Red Sox fan by my dad, who went to school in Amherst and became a Red Sox fan then and was my entire life. I grew up on Long Island, but he was a tried and true Red Sox fan for the entire time we lived there, and my first experience really watching baseball was during the 2004 season, and yet, despite having religiously watched that team, I’ve never been to a game at Fenway, so I’m excited to see if I can overpay for a ticket on StubHub and spend the afternoon there.
That sounds like a great plan! So you’re telling me you were a Sox fan in enemy territory for all those years?
[laughs] Well, whatever everyone was into when I was growing up, I wasn’t really into. I always did my own thing. All of my friends loved the Yankees, and I was never in for it and thought it was stupid, and even when I went to college in upstate New York, all of my friends were from Massachusetts and diehard Red Sox fans. That 2004 team is still what I consider to be the most charismatic baseball team to ever exist. I even shouted out Jason Varitek in The G Word, if you caught that. Johnny Damon, Trot Nixon, Pedro Martinez, it was just one of the all-time classic lineups, and that was my entry-way into baseball as a sport. Even now, living in Los Angeles, I follow the Dodgers, because I feel like following the home team is the most rewarding way to watch baseball, but the Red Sox will always have that special place in my heart as my first love of a team, so I’m excited to actually see Fenway for the first time in my life, as shocking as that is.
I’ll let you take it in however you see fit, but all I’m going to say is that there’s a majestic quality to Fenway, no matter how many times you go there, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. It’s funny you bring up the shoutout in The G Word, because as soon as I heard it, I knew I had at least a few more questions to ask you. If this conversation goes south at any point, we can at least revert back to talking about the Sox. Not to mention, Varitek doesn’t get nearly enough love for what he did for the team, so that shoutout is top–tier.
[laughs] I agree! He held that team down. The heart and soul with the tight pants and the high socks. That’s my other memory of him. A man with a juicy butt, but he still wore really tight pants, and high socks and we have to give him some respect for that.
Obviously when people think of Adam Conover, they think of Adam Ruins Everything, and rightly so. Having balanced that show with your stand-up, and the case being the same with The G Word, have the two mediums commingled or affected the approach to the other?
Oh, absolutely. First of all, Adam Ruins Everything came about as a result of doing open mics in bar basements in New York in the late 2000s and early 2010s. After awhile, you learn how to be funny, but you start to realize that you need to do more than that to get people to pay attention to you, and remember what you say. So I started telling stories about what I found in all of my reading. I’ve always been an information sponge, having absorbed information and just spat it back out, and once I started integrating that into my stand-up, people started paying more attention. Specifically with the first story I told about the De Beers engagement ring, which became the first ever episode of Adam Ruins Everything. I did that on stage, and I noticed that people started leaning forward more and remembering the bits more, and that was the genesis of Adam Ruins Everything. Then, after I did the show for a long time and started going back out on tour, people started coming to the shows more because they loved Adam Ruins Everything, and that made me want to give them even more information in my stand-up, so I started going the other way and telling stories of what I had learned during my research over the years while the show was on air.
Like I said, my last two hour tours were very educational. I did the election-themed tour all about presidential history, and Mind Parasites Live was all about advertising, addiction, and also biology. Those shows went really well, I loved doing them, and the crowds were super into them, but like I said, they started feeling a little bit stale, and I wanted to do a show of just stand-up. You’ll still be able to learn a lot when you go to show, but it feels a little bit more like a stand-up show as opposed to a comedy TedTalk.
Another thing is that on Adam Ruins Everything, I played a character, a heightened version of myself. With the ultra-tall hair and the dorky outfits, it was sort of the Pee-Wee Herman version of myself. On The G Word, I got closer to just being Adam Conover, but when I’m doing stand-up now, I’m really trying to get to myself and have it be my real emotions and questions onstage and being present with the audience. That’s the toughest part of stand-up for me, and I think I’m getting there. When people come out to see me, they will be getting the real me in the flesh, and as I tell everyone, my favorite part of stand-up is meeting the people who watch the show. When you make television, you don’t always get to directly communicate with the people who are enjoying the content, but when I do stand-up, I finally get to meet the folks who watch the shows and enjoy them. I do a meet and greet after every show if the venue has the time to accommodate, so if anyone wants to come out and get a selfie, and chat for a bit, that’s like my favorite part of the experience, and I’m looking forward to doing it in Boston.
That’s what’s up. I’m sure I can speak for all your fans here when I say we can’t wait to have you back in Boston. But I don’t think we can end this conversation without chatting about The G Word, at least a little bit.
For sure, let’s do it.
Like I said, I had a chance to check it out, and absolutely loved it. As a person who grew up involved in campaigns, and being very informed because of my parents making a very conscious effort to make sure that was the case, this show was an immediate hit for me, and I know that isn’t unique to me. So, what was the initial spark for the show?
The reason it first came about was because Barack and Michelle Obama have a production company, and they had optioned the rights to the Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk, which is a book about all the bizarre and incredible things the government does, and I happened to have read the book in late 2018. I read the book and I loved it because Michael Lewis is a great journalist and an incredible writer.
About six months later, I got a call from my manager telling me that Barack and Michelle Obama have optioned the rights to the book, and he asked me if I wanted to pitch on it. Of course I wanted to because I loved the book, and I’m very interested in the government and talking about our institutions and how important they are, so I jumped at the chance. I was going to use my method to dive into all the incredible things, both good and bad, that the government does. That was enough to get it approved by Netflix, and then when we actually got down to working on it, the question we had was “Why has our faith in government fallen so far?”
It’s a trend that you’ve seen over the last 50 years where people are trusting and believing in the government less and less than they ever have, and it’s had really bad effects. We end up disavowing the government, and we end up looking less and less well, and what we found in that process was that it was attributed to people who wanted to avoid taxes and weren’t interested in the common good, and spread the idea that the government sucks and can’t do anything. We felt it was really important to push back against that notion, and that became the underlying theme of the whole show.
Beyond that, my goal was to show what we were able to do. Adam Ruins Everything was a very popular show with sixty-five episodes filmed over four years, but I’m really eager to show that the show wasn’t just a single show, but an entire format or genre of comedy documentary, where if you make things fun and funny and engaging, people will come and watch it time and time again. It’s not vegetables, instead it’s something that people really want to eat. So that’s my mission in life, to prove that the audience is smart and they want to learn. If you make content that’s compelling and funny, they’ll want to come along with you and I think that’s what I’m doing with the show, hopefully for the rest of my career.
Can we expect more of The G Word? Or was it a visual unicorn?
It’s a limited series, so we’re unlikely to do more, but I’m never going to stop doing content like it. Doing educational, comedic content is what I was put here to do, and if fans want more of it, they can come see me at Laugh Boston or check out my podcast Factually, or the projects that I have in the pipeline that hopefully I can talk more about soon.
I could keep you all day with questions about working with Barack Obama, but perhaps that’s a conversation for another day.
[laughs] I had a great time working with him, and the best way I can describe it is that he was annoyingly funny for a President. I don’t know why I had to spend my whole career doing comedy for free in bar basements, while this guy was busy running the free world, and comes out on the other end as funny as I am in one scene. It’s kind of annoying to me as a comedian [Laughs], however, he was quite good on the show and he made the running joke better. As annoyed as I am, I’m also very impressed.
ADAM CONOVER :: Thursday, July 21 to Saturday, July 23 at Laugh Boston, 425 Summer St. in Boston, MA :: Thursday at 8 p.m.; Friday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday at 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. :: Tickets are $30 to $35