Rory Scovel Made a Fully Improvised Stand-up Special for You

Comedian Rory Scovel has decided to apply the “Fuck it, we’ll do it live” spirit to his new comedy special. Titled Live Without Fear, the project is equal parts comedy special and documentary, and follows Scovel during shows performed at Relapse Theatre in Atlanta, in March 2018, in which he “decided to find out what would happen if he fully improvised the show from start to finish for six straight nights,” per the press release. Scott Moran, a writer-director on Scovel’s Comedy Central series Robbie, will make his documentary directorial debut with the project, which is slated for release on Thursday, June 24, on Scovel’s YouTube channel. It will also be released as an audio album that same day.

Here’s a more documentary-ish clip from the special, in which Scovel explains his history in both stand-up and improv. “The more you do stand-up, the more you start learning how to craft an hour a little bit more professionally — like, Here’s the hour I wrote, because now I can shoot it, put it out there, get exposure, and make money out of it. And a little bit of that takes you away from the spontaneous thing that I enjoy.”

And here’s another decidedly more stand-up-ish clip from the special, where Scovel stumbles onto a joke that would’ve made a great closer but continues on anyway. “There was a very clear moment in that riff that was so clearly the ‘Say ’night and get offstage’ moment,” he tells the crowd. “All of us were like, Surely that’s the ending, and then my goddamn brain was like, Nah, let’s do ten more minutes.”

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