Adam Conover built his career on the cold, hard truth — but that's only half the story. By the time Conover debuted his show Adam Ruins Everything on CollegeHumor in 2014, he had already been rehearsing its core formula for a while, a two-step process Conover describes as "One, say a fact; and two, get yelled at."
He's never been shy about sharing stories from the days before his endless well of pedantry was paying all his bills, but audiences this summer may well be hearing a very different side of those stories, as Conover's new hour of stand-up, Pay Attention, takes a more personal tack to explore the topic of attention through Conover's own childhood diagnosis with attention deficit disorder, or ADD.
To those familiar with Conover's work, Pay Attention might seem like a sharp left turn from the guy who jovially pokes holes in pseudoscience and old wives' tales, but to hear Conover tell it, it's just the latest spin on his long-standing fascination with cultural myth and inherited misinformation.
"The sort of stories that I look to talk about are the ones we were brought up being told," Conover says. "I was told a story my whole life about how I was a lazy kid, that I was bad, that I was impulsive, and it took a long time for me to unlearn that story and come to understand myself more realistically. We're told a particular story about kids with ADD that I'm trying to piece apart and replace with something a little bit more true."
Conover describes his recent Netflix special The G Word in much the same way, saying, "It's this story that the government can't do anything, that it's ineffective and we need to take it apart. That's a story that's become a very deep part of American culture... Whenever there's a narrative like that, it is the most fun thing in the world to puncture it, to tell people 'hold on a second, here's the actual story.'"
Conover's work, and The G Word in particular, often tackles controversial or politically charged topics, but he's careful to avoid "political comedy."
"When people say 'political comedian,' they're thinking of someone who's... making fun of Ted Cruz or whatnot, like what Bill Maher does," Conover says. "I like to take a larger lens than that. I look at the facts as we know them. Sometimes that ventures into the world of politics. More often, though, it's about policy."
Even when speaking directly about the inner workings of government, it's clear that Conover's preferred angles are completely distinct from those of his self-professed "Johnny Carson figure" Jon Stewart.
"The G Word is... about this thing that we hire the politicians to manage, not Republicans vs. Democrats," he says.
Pay Attention seems to speak directly to this unwillingness to be boxed into one narrow subject, though Conover stresses that even his new material touches on broader social issues.
"[Pay Attention] is [also] about the attention economy and all the businesses that are built on trying to steal our attention away from us," he says. "It's about how we can gain more control over that aspect of our lives. That is broadly informational and searching, about me looking for those answers, and I think it goes way beyond any kind of political comedy."
Though the germ of Adam Ruins Everything was initially a stand-up routine, Conover found his niche in visually splashy sketch comedy, and admits that returning to traditional stand-up has required a few adjustments.
"I've actually had to unlearn some of what I was doing as a TV host," he says. "In the past, when I've toured, I've often brought in some of the elements of television... that was great fun to do, but it felt a little bit distant from the audience for me. It felt like I was doing a TV show onstage."
The more personal tone of the material seems to have inspired a shift to a more personal format, and Conover is enthusiastic about the results.
"What I wanted to do for this show was... just be myself in front of an audience with no mediating graphics or writers writing for me," he says. "It's been incredibly rewarding, because I really feel like I am myself onstage, in a way I often haven't been in the past."
Conover brings Pay Attention to the Spokane Comedy Club this weekend, and his pitch to local audiences is a simple-yet-compelling one: "If you come, you will laugh a lot, and you will learn a lot, and I will take a selfie with literally every single person in the crowd who wants one after the show. That is the Adam Conover guarantee." ♦
Adam Conover • Thu, Aug. 18 at 7:30 pm; Fri-Sat, Aug. 19-20 at 7:30 and 10 pm • $20-$35 • Spokane Comedy Club • 315 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-318-9998
