Adam Cayton-Holland booked for Conan next Tuesday -- seriously

Westword was only a few years old when a housewife who lived in a mobile home in Commerce City told us she wanted to write a humor column for the paper. We declined the offer: She wasn't funny, we said. That housewife soon became known around the world as Roseanne,...

By Patricia Calhoun

January 25, 2013

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Westword was only a few years old when a housewife who lived in a mobile home in Commerce City told us she wanted to write a humor column for the paper. We declined the offer: She wasn't funny, we said. That housewife soon became known around the world as Roseanne, who still isn't very funny. But Adam Cayton-Holland was funny from the start.

He was also smart and interested in a wide variety of subjects, including education (when he started writing for us, he was a teacher's aide) and birds (he later wrote a lengthy feature on the disappearing Sage Mountain Grouse). But through it all, he was always funny -- and in fact, his first cover story for Westword detailed his initial attempts at standup comedy.

After his position here was eliminated at the end of 2008, when the economy tanked, Cayton-Holland got serious about being funny. "I used to write a column called What's So Funny? It was almost as popular in Denver as John Elway. Once I got laid for it," he says on his web site, adamisseriouslyfreakingoutrightnow. "I also used to be a 'serious journalist' for a rag in Denver called Westword."

A serious one, and a good one we were sorry to lose.

But our loss was definitely the comedy world's gain. The local night he co-founded as Los Comicos is now the incredibly popular Grawlix, Cayton-Holland is a draw at comedy clubs around the country...and on Tuesday, January 29, he'll be making his late-night standup debut on TBS's Conan .

"This is my first appearance on a late-night TV show," Cayton-Holland tells us. "I did a small spot on the TV show Happy Endings, but yeah, in terms of late night and as a comic, this is my debut. I'm very psyched."

So are we. Seriously.

From Adam Cayton-Holland's Westword archives: "Curtain Call: Denver mourns the loss of its favorite bipolar, one-armed comic/poet/playwright."

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Patricia Calhoun is editor-in-chief of Westword, the alt-weekly she co-founded in September 1977. She’s been inducted into the Colorado Press Association Hall of Fame, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia Hall of Fame and the Colorado Restaurant Association Hall of Fame. She’s also received dozens of local, state and national awards for writing, including first place for feature writing and first place for column writing with the Society of Professional Journalists. Patricia is a weekly commentator on Colorado Inside Out, PBS 12's public affairs roundtable, which has won two Emmys.

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