Rob Corddry and I are driving along Platte Clove Road in upstate-ish New York, struggling to locate the Catskills property where he, an actor and proud Eagle Scout, and I, a candy-ass camping virgin, will pitch a tent and spend the night in the great outdoors. He’s telling me how not to die.
“Stick to the path. Common sense stuff. People get cocky because they feel immortal,” the 46-year-old says while riding shotgun in my rented Nissan Altima, dressed in his dadly royal blue t-shirt, dark Levi’s, and navy Adidas. “Don’t bring your struggles with mortality into the woods. You see it when the grass is growing up through the sidewalks: Nature fucking wins.”
That seems a little intense for a “camping” trip I booked on Tentrr, a campsite reservation app whose name, when spoken, sounds like everyone’s favorite hook-up app. (“You think that’s going to be good or bad for them?” Corddry jokes. “Yeah, I was trying to fuck this girl, but I booked a campsite.”) First, though, we've got to find the place. Google Maps tells me to pull into a driveway flanked with wooden posts bearing “Keep Out” and “No Hunting or Trespassing” signs.
“This is not it. Definitely not it. We’ll get raped here,” Corddry says. He pauses. Less than an hour ago he’d explained the complications of telling a rape joke—that even though he no longer has the “Fuck you, anything can be funny” sense of humor he once did, he thinks even the worst stuff can be funny if it's smart and original. These are the dueling halves of Rob Corddry, a guy who’s aware of what’s problematic, but has built a career on playing characters who revel in problematic.
“Awesome rape joke,” he says, to no one in particular.
Rob Corddry the actor did not arrive fully formed, despite it seeming so. He toiled in something of an acting bardo—random television commercials, improv and sketch comedy, even a tour with the National Shakespeare Company—for years before his breakout moment in 2002. That's when he joined The Daily Show as a correspondent alongside Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Ed Helms. He played Stewart’s pedantic, sardonic foil, alternating dumb humor (pretending he’s from “Macaca” for a punchline about it being located next to “Ya-pee-pee”) with field pieces where he’d wield effusive, fake sympathy for bad people to expose their self-righteous absurdity. (One Corddry Daily Show line presented without context: “Most espresso drinkers don’t have retarded children—and don’t like them!”)
Since leaving The Daily Show in 2006, he’s worked hard to cultivate the role of Hollywood’s most lovable asshole. As a vehemently xenophobic, racist Homeland Security agent in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay; as a horny, misogynistic hedonist in Hot Tub Time Machine; as a blood-spattered doctor-clown in Adult Swim’s Children’s Hospital, for which he’s won two Emmy’s (as the writer and the star). And now, in maybe his highest profile role ever, as conniving, impotent sports agent Joe Krutel opposite The Rock—literally the world's most beloved human—in HBO's Ballers (it's third season starts Sunday, July 23rd).
It's an 11-year run of premium-grade dickishness that makes you wonder: Is Rob Corddry himself a dick, or is he just really good at playing one?
Turns out the road we’re looking for is three minutes back the way we came, two dirt tracks curling through green overgrowth to our campsite. Once we arrive, we set off to gather kindling in the nearby woods (like true outdoorsmen, we bought our logs at the nearest convenience store). Corddry wears black-rimmed glasses, a thin layer of salt-and-pepper stubble, and the all-gray crop-circle hair formation of a man still fighting the good fight. He said he knew when he started losing his hair that he’d never be a leading man. He has a splay-footed, belly-first walk, and a tattoo on his right calf of a hedgehog that he let his then-seven-year-old daughter ink onto him. The baldness and his electric-expressive eyebrows amplify his smile, and wood—not the woods, but, you know, pieces of a tree—makes him smile a lot. Driving around the Massachusetts neighborhood where he grew up, Corddry’s dad would occasionally stop to ogle timber. “Every time we’d pass a woodpile, he’d be like, ‘Maaan, that’s, like, two cord right there! Seasoned wood! That’s for rich people!’” Corddry, who’s used to camping in barren, dusty California, will describe the wood here in the Catskills as “fucking great” and “fast-burning” and “so good.”
Then it comes time to make the fire.
“You have matches right? I’m not rubbing two sticks together,” he declares. “I could probably work it out. I know one guy in my Boy Scout troop who got smoke once.”
Sounds like he was a legend, I say.
“No. He was a fucking loser for sitting there for six hours.”
Corrdry grew up in Weymouth, Massachusetts, a heavily Irish- and Italian-Catholic suburb about fifteen minutes south of Boston. His mom harbored an anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice, an ironic intolerance: she disliked that so many in Southie seemed okay being racist. Turns out he's almost 100% Irish on her side, though he didn't know that until his wife made him take a 23andMe genetic test recently. But at the time, being non-religious in such a homogenous place just left him confused.
“In second grade, this kid goes, ‘You’re not Catholic?! Then whaht ah ya?’” Corrdry remembers with his most wicked Boston accent. “‘Are yah Jewish?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess so. I’m Jewish.’” (It’s important to note here that Corddry is not Jewish, and didn't meet someone who was until college.) “Then this second-grade kid goes, ‘Well, I hate Jews. But I like you.’”
I tell Corddry that maybe he cured a young Bostonian of anti-Semitism. Corddry laughs. “No, he’s probably beating on a Jew now, going, ‘There’s only wan ah you I’ve evah liked, and he’s in the Haht Tahb Time Machine!’”
Growing up as a not-aggressive, not-Catholic guy around rough-and-tumble Southies created tension for a kid who “just wanted everybody to like me.” Corddry has a distinct memory of sitting in his mom’s car in a rainstorm across the street from a first-grade friend’s birthday party, crying, too scared to go in. He never did; his mom drove him home. “I had no name for it, but at times I had almost crippling social anxiety,” he says. “It wasn’t until I was married and had someone I was fully comfortable with that I realized: Oh, I have trouble with people. Comedy is a defense against that. It’s purely that.”
Corddry says most of his adult friends are from his childhood Boy Scout troop. He considers himself a champion for his experience, but not necessarily for the organization—his sister and his mom are both gay, and in the mid-90’s he sent the Boy Scouts an angry letter rejecting his Eagle Scout badge. “[I was] like, ‘How dare you! How could you be the supposed example for men and shun these people?’” He says it was his way of telling his mother that he accepted her. He never heard back.
"I still consider myself an Eagle Scout," he tells me, hands full of twigs, heading back to camp to start a fire with his bare hands (and a box of matches).
In the stone-lined fire pit in the middle of the field, Corddry meticulously arranges the kindling into a small teepee—better for cooking than the alternative “log cabin” formation, he explains. Once he gets it going (with matches, but no paper, he points out proudly), he stands around like a doting father, a shovel for poking the logs in his right hand, beer in his left. He doesn’t help me set up my tent—"Gosh, I’m watching the fire here. I wish I could help.”—but tells me I’m doing great even though I am not doing great. I have to be told “your tent is the gray thing,” because I’m trying to put poles in the yellow part, which is a nylon rain cover that’s not actually the tent. By the time I finally turn my tent into a tent, Corddry’s fire is rising skyward and he's cooing with the pleasure of a satisfied pyro.
“This is fucking great!” he says. “LOOK AT THOSE COALS!”
While consuming Budweiser and tallboys of the local, creatively named Mountain Brew Light and staring into a roaring fire that's keeping the mosquitoes mostly at bay, Corddry tells stories. During the eight years between moving to New York in 1994 and catching his break at the Daily Show, he took a series of meaningless jobs, then got fired from many of them for flagrant apathy. (It helped that he could collect unemployment to the tune of $350 or so.)
It was there in New York that a friend confronted him about his asshole tendencies. “He turned to me and he was like, ‘Sometimes you can be really mean,’” says Corddry. “And I thank him to this day. He made me really need to understand my own sense of humor. ’Cause everybody in Boston is mean. It's a blatant way of showing affection there. ‘Fahck you’ is ‘I love you.’"
He channeled his self-aware Masshole humor into his Daily Show correspondent character, which he admits he mostly copied from Colbert. (”That's good life advice for anything.”) He continued doing improv, too, until a day when he was double-booked for an improv show and a Daily Show hit. As Corddry remembers, Stephen Colbert got in his face to say: "This is your show. This is the show. You got it. You don't have to do that. That's done."
Corddry went west to L.A. in 2006 to star in a Fox show, The Winner, that lasted six episodes. He’s been a moon waxing and waning in the Hollywood universe since, surviving enough humbling experiences and bagging enough solid roles to foster equal parts gratitude and self-respect. Take, for instance, the time he met with an executive at Judd Apatow’s company, as Apatow was rapidly ascending to midas-touch status.
“[The executive] was like, ‘We love you. We think you’d really fit in here. We want to get you in a movie. But with us, you have to climb the ladder. Sort of like Jonah Hill did.’
“I was like, ‘Fuck you! Shove your movies up your ass. I paid my dues, motherfucker.’ And then I auditioned for 40-Year-Old Virgin, and didn't get it. And who got it? I love to see this. It was Jane Lynch.”
I ask if always playing the friend bothers him.
“Actors complaining in general is infuriating to me. But typecasting? The stress is on casting. You're working, motherfucker! I will play the best friend for the rest of my life, as long as I can play shades of that color wheel.” He says that when you’re the lead, “you’re just a sounding board against which more interesting, funny, or crazy characters bounce off of. I want to be the guy that makes the audience go ‘Fuck him!’’ or ‘Yeah, listen to him!’”
The story of Rob Corddry is the story of a guy who's just trying to figure out where he belongs. Maybe as a not-really-Jewish boy in an Irish-Catholic town. Maybe losing a role that eventually goes to Jane Lynch. Maybe as the best friend that makes you say “Fuck him!” but also “Yeah, listen to him!” He says it was liberating when he realized he didn’t have to make everyone like him. But if he’s so damn likable (and he is), it's because, both onscreen and off, he wears the vulnerability of a guy still worried if anyone does.
In his 20’s, Corddry realized that he couldn't shut off the sarcasm. "I’m a politician selling myself, always wanting to get people to elect me into the scope of people they like.” He is both the guy roasting you, and the guy who knows that he's being a dick for roasting you; who makes a rape joke reflexively, but knows right away that it might look bad. He learned early that being offensive was less lonely than not having anyone to offend. “It's instinct at this point,” he says. “It's what I've been doing my whole life. It was a way to get along with everybody.”
“Maybe I’m just like I was in high school,” he says right before telling me that Apatow story. “Still wandering around from group to group and not part of any of ‘em.”
As we stare into a fire, cloud cover hiding the promised stars, we hear demonic yodeling somewhere off in the distance. “Are there coyotes around here?” Corddry asks, as if the guy who had to be told “the gray thing is your tent” might be an expert on Catskills fauna. I venture, based on the Planet Earth episodes I’ve watched, that the demon yodelers sound like monkeys. “Yeah, chimps,” Corddry says in agreement. “Catskill chimpanzees. They’re the worst.”
