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"FacebookPinterest\n\n&amp;quot;Children&amp;#39;s Hospital&amp;quot; is one of the funniest shows on television. It is also one of the strangest and hardest to find. Airing Thursdays at midnight on the Cartoon Network&amp;#39;s Adult Swim block, the show that began as a spoof of overly earnest and fantastical hospital dramas like &amp;quot;Grey&amp;#39;s Anatomy&amp;quot; is enjoying a brilliant and daring third season. GQ chatted with the show&amp;#39;s amiable creator and star, Rob Corddry, about his comedy history.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n GQ: How did you get involved in comedy?\n\n Rob Corddry: I went to New York right after graduation in the early &amp;#39;90s and mostly did terrible Shakespeare for years, but I was always cast as the clowns and the jackasses so I just sort of gravitated towards comedy. Luckily I did and found the Upright Citizens Brigade and that sort of cemented it for sure. It&amp;#39;s a shame, because the real money is in crappy Shakespeare.\n\n GQ: Were you not a comedy nerd when you were growing up?\n\n Rob Corddry: No, I definitely was. I just always fancied myself more of an actor than a comedian before I realized that only assholes make that kind of distinction. So I definitely grew up, I totally wore out Steve Martin&amp;#39;s Let&amp;#39;s Get Small and listened to a lot of Bill Cosby when I was young, and then probably mostly British influences like Monty Python and The Young Ones, as well as Kids in the Hall and that kind of thing.\n\n GQ: So you never considered stand-up or anything like that?\n\n Rob Corddry: No. I never really did. That&amp;#39;s a real art form in itself and one that I really think to be good at you have to devote your entire life to. It&amp;#39;s the really, really good ones that end up getting to do the things that I like to do: movies, TV shows, and stuff like that. It&amp;#39;s a really hard gig and it just never called to me.\n\n GQ: Was it hard for you to accept you weren&amp;#39;t going to be Hamlet?\n\n Rob Corddry: Yeah, man. It&amp;#39;s still hard for me. I see them all pick away, and not that I&amp;#39;m ever going to do another Shakespeare play again, but I still love Shakespeare and old drama. Like Hamlet&amp;#39;s gone, I don&amp;#39;t even remember it passing, but I remember looking at my hairline and going, &amp;quot;Yeah, Hamlet&amp;#39;s like a grad student.&amp;quot; So that&amp;#39;s over. I got to play Mercutio once, and I was way too old to play that. There are some meaty roles I could still play\u2014I could probably bang out a good...well not Henry V, one of my favorites, I can&amp;#39;t do that, I couldn&amp;#39;t do Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing, I&amp;#39;m a little too old for that one. I&amp;#39;m up around Lord Capulet, you know? Meaty, but thankless.\n\n GQ: How did you make that transition from being consumed by crappy Shakespeare to getting into comedy?\n\n Rob Corddry: I was doing really crappy Shakespeare; crappy downtown theater in New York, and a woman I had done a play with asked me to audition for a sketch group. I was at a point where I was auditioning for everything just so I&amp;#39;d get good at it. So of course I accepted and I actually got the part, which hadn&amp;#39;t happened yet. I kind of wavered about it and thought, &amp;quot;Well, I could just quit if I didn&amp;#39;t like it.&amp;quot; I kind of hated it at the beginning because I didn&amp;#39;t think the sketch group was at a point where they were hiring external writers to write stuff and I was really not on board with any of their stuff. But then I guess, kind of, that nudged me into realizing that you have to generate your own material, even on that consequential level.\n\n GQ: Was that difficult to develop? How do you figure out how to be funny and create?\n\n Rob Corddry: I&amp;#39;ve always defined myself as a writer, I&amp;#39;ve never decided what it was I was gonna write\u2014I was a journalism major for one day in college. I just decided I was going to be an actor, and that&amp;#39;s fairly recently, probably in the last five to seven years, probably halfway through my time at &amp;quot;The Daily Show&amp;quot; when I realized, &amp;quot;Oh, wow, I really have to learn how to write. I&amp;#39;m not a writer.&amp;quot; I always fancied myself one, but I&amp;#39;m not. I&amp;#39;m so far from a writer. And, you know, I still feel like that every time I sit at the computer.\n\n GQ: At &amp;quot;The Daily Show,&amp;quot; how much writing were you doing?\n\n Rob Corddry: We had very little, if anything, to do with writing the in-studio stuff with Jon, there was some room for improv, but that&amp;#39;s about it. I may have written one half of one of those things. Mostly our contribution, other than the performance, was to the field pieces where we would go out and interview assholes. And those were largely written by the producer and the correspondent.\n\n GQ: Did you pick up stuff in that process that you would bring to something like &amp;quot;Children&amp;#39;s Hospital&amp;quot;?\n\n Rob Corddry: No, absolutely nothing. It&amp;#39;s a completely different thing. I&amp;#39;m writing something completely different right now and I&amp;#39;m realizing that &amp;quot;Children&amp;#39;s Hospital&amp;quot; has little or no basis on how to write anything else because it&amp;#39;s a completely different animal.\n\n GQ: This season especially on &amp;quot;Children&amp;#39;s Hospital&amp;quot; it seems like you&amp;#39;re taking a lot of chances\u2014like the recent &amp;#39;70s-set episode. Can you ever go too far on the show?\n\n Rob Corddry: There&amp;#39;s definitely limits. We have enough of a story to fuel jokes, especially the &amp;#39;70s episode. Actually like, three, an A, B, and C story that are really just a joke engine. But in terms of what we can and can&amp;#39;t do, we limit ourselves to not being too much like &amp;quot;Grey&amp;#39;s Anatomy&amp;quot; because a lot of their storylines we could do them verbatim on &amp;quot;Children&amp;#39;s Hospital&amp;quot; and just like, &amp;quot;Put a poop joke here and there&amp;quot; and they would play, you know, their scripts are just so ridiculous. But also, we can write something and it will seem too Airplane!-y. The PA announcements are probably the closest we get to an actual homage, but when you&amp;#39;re doing this kind of absurd humor it can easily veer into too Airplane! territory. And that&amp;#39;s what it is about non-sequiturs. While we definitely make non-sequitur jokes, it&amp;#39;s all about taking it very seriously.\n\n GQ: How do you start the process? Do you start with the joke and then build the B plot around it, or does the plot come first and you start making it the engine?\n\n Rob Corddry: No, we just kind of think of ideas for stories. We do two different things. One, we&amp;#39;ll take up ideas for entire episodes, like the &amp;#39;70s episode or another one of our off-format or special episodes. Mostly we&amp;#39;ll just think of stories, like two-sentence story ideas, which we&amp;#39;ve done already for next season and we&amp;#39;re in the process of sifting through all those and choosing what to put together and what will complement each other possibly and throw those together and build them up.\n\n GQ: Do you consider a character&amp;#39;s arc in any way or is that too precious?\n\n Rob Corddry: We&amp;#39;re doing that more, actually. It started by accident, like for some reason this would be better for Malin [Akerman] than for Lake [Bell], and then we realized Malin&amp;#39;s character is a lot darker than Lake&amp;#39;s character, and then once we realized that, she became a psychopath! So she&amp;#39;s probably the most developed in that sense, but we&amp;#39;re definitely finding more shades in what makes [Rob] Huebel&amp;#39;s and [Ken] Marino&amp;#39;s character different because they&amp;#39;re fairly interchangeable, because Ken is the more sensitive one, the McDreamy, and Ken is the more arrogant one, so we&amp;#39;ll be taking that to more extremes.\n\n GQ: Do you have a fourth season mapped out?\n\n Rob Corddry: Not really, I got about five or six episodes I know I want to do and then I got pages and pages of ideas.\n\n GQ: Are you awaiting a renewal?\n\n Rob Corddry: No, we&amp;#39;re picked up! We&amp;#39;re hoping to start shooting in November.\n\n GQ: Is there something beyond the pale that you haven&amp;#39;t tried, or is that too &amp;quot;Grey&amp;#39;s Anatomy&amp;quot;?\n\n Rob Corddry: &amp;quot;Grey&amp;#39;s&amp;quot; is actually more wild\u2014our stories make more sense because of the absurd context. In the dramatic context, their stories are completely outrageous. I don&amp;#39;t know if I explained that right. It&amp;#39;s all about context. In terms of what&amp;#39;s too outrageous, we&amp;#39;re not going to have an episode called &amp;quot;9/11 Dildo Party,&amp;quot; but you know, Adult Swim is basically the Internet of television, you can get away with a lot."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/rob-corddry-interview-childrens-hospital>