Greenville’s Rory Scovel chats about his class-clown childhood and his new special on Max.
A comic walks into a bar. Not just any bar, mind you, but the one tucked into the basement of Greenville’s most august private club. So it is that on a rain-drenched Saturday afternoon, two guys settle into the only casual space in the Poinsett Club, the home to debutante balls, black-tie galas, and a dress code that would never fit Rory Scovel’s attire.
The Greenville native wears jeans and a gray aloha shirt festooned with oranges—the same one he wore at all 55 gigs on The Last Tour, his run that started in April and ended late last month at the Peace Center.
That’s a long way from the Piano Bar in Spartanburg, where he started his comedy career exactly 20 years ago at an open mic. Now 43 and based in L.A., his most recent standup special, Rory Scovel: Religion, Sex and a few things in between, premiered in February on MAX.
He fell for film long before comedy. When he was 5, he saw Back to the Future and began reenacting a scene where Biff, the bully, struts down a side street.
“I did that because, I was like. . . this is, like fun, dude,’” says the self-described hyperactive class clown who attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church and Christ Church Episcopal School before graduating from Greenville High in 1999.
During an hour-long conversation, Scovel shows you nobody else but Scovel. Funny is who this guy is; as Decider.com puts it: “He feels and (tbh) looks like someone you might know in your real life.”
From Class Clown to Head of the Comedy Class
Reality is hard to escape when your first birthday forces you to stay in it. “My mother,” he says of Cindy Scovel, “literally passed away the day that I turned 1.”
Of trauma, tragedy, and other such fodder for funny, he says, “I don’t think those components are necessary, but I wonder, dramatically and psychologically, what brings me towards a more comedic space; I feel like there is this birth out of some sense of darkness.”
When he was 14, he and some of his six siblings started making five-minute camcorder movies.
“My family would watch it, and they would be like, ‘Oh, he’s a little filmmaker,’” he says. “I think as adults, we don’t realize that when you compliment kids in certain ways, it really has a profound impact because they start to identify themselves.”
In a family filled with wiseacres, he had to snatch any attention he could get. In 2003, after graduating from USC Upstate, he worked as a WPSA-TV cameraman, then moved to D.C. and New York to work the clubs.
In 2010, he appeared in his first TV gig on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The next year, after Scovel’s first standup album, Dilation, debuted, Conan O’Brien blew the doors open, offering him the first of numerous appearances over the years. Last April, O’Brien tweeted, “Rory Scovel is one of the funniest people I know.”
Today, Scovel’s credits as an actor, writer, and producer in TV, film, standup specials, and podcasts total nearly 60 on IMDb, the internet movie database. Highlights include two years on the Apple TV+ series Physical, and starring opposite Amy Schumer in the 2018 rom-com I Feel Pretty; after a particularly awkward onscreen tryst, Decider.com called Scovel “sneaky sexy.”
A couple of years ago, he lost his father, Donnie—“I’m an orphan now, and I’m looking to be adopted.” To frame his grief, he turned to painting. His oil and acrylic works, which sell for $4,000 and up, look like pieces from a stained-glass artist tripping on acid.
Before he has to go—heading back to his wife, Jordan Boughrum, and their daughter, Elliot (“Ellie-Chelli” is tattooed on his chest)—he’s asked to describe himself in one word:
“Artistic.”
Then the comedic artist walks out of the bar—looking forward to the “highs” he gets from his club gigs.
“I perceive myself as not necessarily having a very big work ethic in standup. I just don’t, but I will say when I show up to a show, I am there for the drug, and I want the drug,” he says. “I know the only way I get the drug is, truly, to go onstage and be great every time.”
Where have you seen Rory Scovel?
TV: Conan (9 times), Physical (Apple TV+)
Movies: I Feel Pretty, Old Dads
Comedy specials: Rory Scovel Tries Stand-Up for the First Time (on Netflix)
The latest: Rory Scovel: Religion, Sex and a few things in between (on Max)
