A lot of indie singer-songwriters stop in Charlottesville on their tours, and many of them are not to my taste. So when I discovered that Rory Scovel was coming to town, I was reasonably certain I was in for another acoustic guitar-picking, overly emotive turnip. To my delight, I was completely wrong.
You may be smarter and more with it than I am (not difficult, really), so you know that Scovel is a standup comedian, writer, and actor. You might have seen him in comedies that include You’re Cordially Invited (with Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon 2025), The House (Ferrell and Amy Pohler, 2017), Old Dads (Bill Burr, 2023), I Feel Pretty (Amy Schumer, 2018), and Babylon (Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, 2022). (The upside to him telling jokes instead of reenacting movie appearances is that the ticket price would be much higher if any of the aforementioned actors had followed him around on tour.)
Scovel, who is credited as a contributing writer for 20 episodes of the mindbending “The Eric Andre Show” in the last decade, is on the Know Your Enemy Tour, a followup of sorts to his 2024 HBO special, “Religion, Sex, and a Few Things in Between.” The last round of his material, while not nearly as explosive and furious in pacing as the Andre vehicle, was outlandish in a different way.
Scovel’s “oh well, guess this is my life now” approach reflects a self-defeating charm that explodes at a hint of crowd apathy. His style causes more laughs in exponential, compounding comedy rarely exhibited by his peers. Targeting the trappings of domesticity, he explains how Los Angeles turned his wife into a witch, and shares gripes with his real romantic history versus pornography exploits.
But the South Carolina native is maybe funnier still when his usually faint Southern accent gets fully country-fried as he imitates himself as the loser in the (hopefully) theoretical universe where his punchlines exist. Regarding the tour name, it seems that the enemy to know would be himself, and for our benefit, that knowledge yields hysterical results.
