Rob Corddry Likes Watching Paint Fly

It seems wrong that Rob Corddry works in an office. Part of me wants to think every aspect of his life and work is somehow riotously funny, but the fantasy dissolves quickly. Corddry’s office at The Daily Show sits across the street from a car dealership. Still, it’s comfortable and brightly lit, filled with plants and pictures of his two supreme loves—his wife Sandra and the Boston Red Sox (he hails from Massachusetts, after all). There’s a frequently napped-upon couch along one wall and a rug on the floor that he warns, in his familiar deadpan, is “too dirty to even walk on.”
In a few short months, though, Corddry will pack up these belongings, bid farewell to The Daily Show and begin shooting new Fox TV series The Winner, in which he’ll star as a thirtysomething agoraphobic slacker who lives with his parents but tries to turn his life around after getting reacquainted with his childhood sweetheart. “It’s all done in a Wonder Years format,” says Corddry, “in which the 45-year-old looks back on these days with whimsy and nostalgia. Oh, and it’s peppered with the word ‘vagina.’”
But The Winner isn’t Corddry’s first starring role. Back in the summer of 2003, he and a bunch of his fellow Upright Citizens Brigade improv actors traveled upstate and filmed a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary (read: no scripted dialogue), about paintball. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story—which netted glowing reviews on the festival circuit—is finally available on DVD and will have an opportunity to coax laughs from a much wider audience.