Adam Conover May Be Getting Vulnerable on Stage, But He’s Still Riled Up About a Hollywood in Decline

There are two Adam Conovers. One, the guy you probably know the best, played a satirical know-it-all on Adam Ruins Everything and has gone on to become a champion of the Hollywood working class. Other Adam, the guy he says a lot of people don’t know as well, is a touring stand-up whose recent demise of a 15-year-relationship has inspired him to delve to some real personal material.

The latter lays everything pretty bare in Big Divorce Energy, his recent hour that dropped Oct. 23 on his YouTube channel. It’s a pivot for anyone who just knows him from his TV work or his penchant for opining on podcasts. “I had always directed my comedy outwards,” says Conover, “talking about the world and things in the world, issues, history, politics, science, informing people of things. I had never really turned inward.”

Looking inward involved candor about dating and sex in the wake of his split from illustrator Lisa Hanawalt, who worked on BoJack Horseman and created the Netflix series Tuca & Bertie. They remain friends and Hanawalt even gave her ex a particularly good note as he was refining the set, helping him move some things around to find the right joke to land on: a delightfully crude punchline that may offend the always even-keeled DC fandom.

“I’m on this quest to understand myself and my sexuality, especially what drives straight men, men who grew up straight or identify as straight in America,” he says. “Because I think that our sexuality is kind of the great unexamined frontier… I think straight men are the most sexually repressed people.”

In any conversation with Conover — and you can listen to the full thing here — one can’t help but dig into his thoughts on the industry. During the 2023 strikes, he became one of the most biggest advocates for Hollywood unions and outspoken members of the WGA. He has railed against merger culture and, even a month after it was formalized, a post calling Skydance’s once looming acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery a “disaster” is still pinned atop his Instagram page. Now that it’s all done and dusted, he has not changed his tune. “We tried to avert the asteroid coming and we failed,” he says. “Now it’s coming and we’re all gonna face the consequences.”

His frequently strong words for the people who essentially write his checks beg the question: has he seen a negative impact on his work? Conover doesn’t see it that way, and he’s the first to say that everyone but those at the very top agree with him. “There’s a long tradition of my type of comedian being antagonistic towards the network brass,” he says. “On Adam Ruins Everything, we talked about the cable monopolies and advertising and stuff like that. That’s why the audience likes me. And so if they want to work with me, to get my audience, then that’s what they’re gonna get.”

But Conover also knows that those companies aren’t buying his particular brand of comedy at the moment, which is why he elected to self-release the new hour instead of shopping it around.

“The companies have given up on what I do and sort of pushed me to new media,” says Conover. “David Zaslav could [have given] a living wage and health insurance for people to write a bunch of comedy that he gets to own and monetize, but he and David Ellison and Ted Sarandos don’t want to do that anymore. Instead, I’ve got to build my own business on YouTube.”