The Adam Ruins Everything Election Special Proves 2016 Isn’t As Hellish As We Think
Images via truTV
Adam Ruins Everything is a half-hour comedy designed for segmented viewing, the televisual equivalent of a Lunchables box. Every episode of the truTV series comes apportioned into discrete lines of assault on the thing being ruined: “Adam Ruins Hollywood” takes on awards shows, then movie ratings, then reality TV; “Adam Ruins Sex” includes equal helpings of circumcision, herpes, and the hymen; “Adam Ruins Immigration,” a recent standout, deconstructs border security, then immigration courts, then mass deportation. The structure hails to the show’s roots—it originated as a web series on CollegeHumor, and is produced by that website’s production studio, Big Breakfast—and speaks to the changing shape of TV comedy in a world where fewer and fewer people watch comedy on TV. Like late night talk shows and pretty much every memorable Last Week Tonight segment, Adam Ruins Everything comes prepackaged for the internet. This isn’t just a play for virality, though virality is certainly important to comedy creators; it’s about making television accessible to people watching on their phones, on their tablets, during a coffee break, scrolling through Twitter in the coatroom at a friend of a friend’s housewarming party (I’m just, you know, speculating here). It also allows a show to market itself: if you’re hesitant to dive into a new series, you can watch that 5-minute clip on your timeline and get a pretty good sense of what you’re in for. Many conventional sitcoms, not designed for social media afterlives, present higher barriers to entry—call it the “I know I should watch Catastrophe and I will eventually, okay???” effect. With an expansive slate of segment-based, personality-driven shows like Adam Ruins Everything, Billy On the Street, Impractical Jokers, and Jon Glaser Loves Gear, truTV seems determined to dismantle these barriers—to make content that bounces around our feeds until the cows come home, or at least until a new episode replaces it next week.
So while “The Adam Ruins Everything Election Special,” airing tonight on truTV, may not be particularly out of character for Adam Conover, an accomplished standup comedian and public speaker, it does offer a special treat for viewers unaccustomed to watching him ruin so much in one sitting. Taped before a live audience, the special clocks in a little under an hour. Like the series in general, it’s divided into thematically unified segments, a few of which are especially snackable: why this presidential election isn’t really so unprecedented, why America lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to women and politics, why it might not be so bad to elect a career politician into a job that requires a good deal of politicking. And whereas the series usually presents Adam (the character; “Conover” will denote the man) with diegetic interlocutors—characters for whom he is ruining this or that, with occasional asides to the camera—the special is basically standup, or whatever’s the standup equivalent of a TED talk. Certain juicy historical nuggets are given life onstage by Adam Lustick and Eliza Skinner, but the hour mostly belongs to Conover, who carries us on a whirlwind historical tour with an academic’s analytic precision and a satirist’s exasperated skepticism. There are some genuinely surprising revelations here, including the fact that a woman has likely already wielded presidential powers, albeit covertly: when Woodrow Wilson was left incapacitated by a stroke, his wife Edith fulfilled many of his duties, supposedly consulting him on certain issues while delegating others. Conover also makes the rather disheartening clarification that “money in politics,” when framed as a pox on presidential elections, is a red herring. Were money truly capable of deciding a presidential contest, he argues, Jeb Bush would be the GOP nominee; the real danger is in dark money influencing local elections, where coverage of down-ballot candidates is scant and a single misleading commercial can decide the race. As in many other episodes, he doesn’t ruin the subject at hand so much as he reframes our perception of it with added, necessary context. This is election is crazy, but it probably isn’t apocalyptic. People can be hateful, but they can also change.
Conover and his co-writer for the episode, the standup comic Gonzalo Cordova, rehearsed and honed the special in a fifteen-city tour across the country. I attended their performance in Philadelphia, where it was a strange pleasure to see several hundred Pennsylvanians—young and old, kids and parents—pack into the Trocadero Theater for the live version of an off-kilter cable show adapted from a CollegeHumor web series by a guy who got started in comedy with videos like “The Machine That Turns Food Into Poop;.”Few TV writers have the privilege of workshopping their scripts with one live audience, let alone fifteen; for Conover and his team, the opportunity did not go unappreciated. “Part of our message is that we’re not all that different. We’re not on Team Red or Team Blue,” he said in an interview. “And we had a very similar reaction to the show everywhere. It helped my confidence that we’re right about that—we’re not as different as we think. We tried to write a show that would appeal not to people’s political opinions, but their human opinions. If you agree with one candidate or the other, everyone has similar bad feelings about the election.”
He learned quickly that some jokes were not up to par, and certain topics simply weren’t suitable for the special. “Early on we had this whole section about how money in politics doesn’t really work in large elections,” he said, referring to what in its ultimate form is still one of the special’s strongest segments. “It’s sort of a classic, This is a scam! But it ended up not being that resonant with audiences, ‘cause who really cares that millionaires and billionaires are getting scammed? It’s not that relatable. So we folded it into the section about local elections.” Then there was the problem of equal opportunity skewering: “In the first act of the show we have a lot of Trump jokes, and in earlier drafts it took us a while to get to our first Hillary joke, so we moved a couple up,” he said. “We wanted to give everyone something to laugh at. Some people like making fun of Trump more; some people like making fun of Hillary more. We wanted to give them both a chance to laugh before we try to open their minds.”