Adam Conover returns to his CollegeHumor roots this week with a new stand-up comedy special, “Adam Conover: Unmedicated,” which delves into the comedian’s history with ADD and his subsequent Adderall addiction.
The show, which launched Wednesday, is streaming on Dropout (the indie platform owned by the rebranded CollegeHumor company) as part of the new “Dropout Presents” series of stand-up specials, which debuted earlier this year with Hank Green’s special in June.
Conover said Variety he has wanted to do this project for fifteen years. After all this time, what made the “Adam Ruins Everything” star choose the niche streamer as the place to house his first stand-up special over a Netflix, Hulu, Max or Amazon — besides the ties that made him bond with Dropout CEO Sam Reich and the old CollegeHumor crew with whom he started his career?
First, the subject.
“Many people know me as an information comedian, right? I do comedy about important topics,” Conover shared Variety. “They don’t know me as a stand-up comedian. And stand-up comedy is my first love, so I wanted to do a real stand-up show, I didn’t want to give any information. I didn’t want that. This is how you can change the world. I just wanted to make jokes about myself, about my life. It is a very personal story. The entire special is about my childhood diagnosis of ADD. I was probably one of the first people in the country to be diagnosed with ADHD, or at least very early on.”
Bringing the “very personal” special to Dropout via a major streamer gave Conover “the opportunity to do it, to do it on my own terms, to have it come out the way I want.”
“To be able to pay attention to every detail, and to have it come out on this incredible platform where people are going to watch it and care about it, that’s very rare to be able to do that now as a comedian,” Conover said. “To not have to put your special on YouTube for free and hope people watch, or to put it on a major streamer and hope their algorithm will show it to people.”
In “Unmedicated,” Conover goes into detail about how Adderall affected him “the same way speed would” when he used it as a child and into adulthood.
“It made me grind my teeth and it made me want to smoke cigarettes, and it reduced my appetite, and I had trouble sleeping and things like that,” he said. “They don’t tell you that and it’s not clear, ‘Hey, your nine-year-old, we’re giving him amphetamines.’ So keep an eye on them.’ If we’re a little more honest about what we’re doing here, and that medication isn’t the end all be all, and that there are other paths you can explore and you can do that mindfully – then that would be: my hope. And if you get medicated and start, I don’t know, drinking four shots of whiskey every night to fall asleep, which is what I did, then, hey, maybe reevaluate.
During the special, Conover makes a point of not taking a position on how ADD should be treated with or without medication, but rather explaining what he says the drug Adderall specifically did to him.
“The special is called ‘Non-Medical’ not because I am against prescription treatments for ADD, but simply because they have never worked for me and have caused me problems,” Conover said. “I felt addicted to them for a while, and they caused me to develop other addictions as well. And I was fine, but other people might not be. And I think there’s a lot of over-medicalization and over-medication in our society, but at the same time, so many people are benefiting from these medications in a really genuine way. Friends of mine do that, people I love do too; and so I am not against them. I just want us to have a little more of an open conversation about this.
It’s also important that Conover knows his audience the actual ingredients of Adderall by the end of his special: “One of the jokes I make is they prescribed me Adderall, and they don’t tell you those are amphetamines, right?” said Conover. “They even put ‘amphetamine salts’ on the bottle. And I think you should say, ‘Oh, salting. Those aren’t really amphetamines. It has salt in it, so it’s something different.’ They are straight amphetamines.”