‘Daily Show’ Alum: Why Nobody Would Dare ‘Compete’ With Colbert

Rob Corddry knew he’d never be able to compete with Stephen Colbert when they were both correspondents on The Daily Show—so he didn’t even try.

“I’m like the least competitive person in history,” Corddry, 55, told me on Obsessed: The Podcast, joking that even his wife tells him he should be “more competitive.”

“You’d be an idiot to compete with Stephen Colbert,” he said. “What you do is you copy Stephen Colbert. You do what he does, and then eventually, it becomes your own thing.”

As for what happened to Colbert and The Late Show at CBS, Corddry said, “It really upset me,” calling the now-former host “one of the people in my life that I consider a role model.”

“He’s a gentleman, and he handled it like a gentleman, and it made his jokes funnier until the day he left,” Corddry added. “I love that guy. And I have no doubt that we have not seen the last of Stephen Colbert.”

In the 20 years since he left The Daily Show, Corddry has earned four Emmy Awards for his short-form comedy series Children’s Hospital, made guest appearances on hit comedy shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development, and co-starred with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in HBO’s Ballers.

Now, he’s getting renewed awards buzz for his uncharacteristically dramatic role on the AMC series The Audacity. In the show, which takes a savage inside look at the current state of Silicon Valley, Corddry plays Tom Ruffage, the Deputy Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs, who ultimately becomes the story’s most tragic figure as he tries, and fails, to get the tech industry to do something genuinely helpful for the world.

Corddry, who started out his career performing Shakespeare and other “serious” theater pieces before discovering improv comedy, said he was never “intimidated” by the heavy material.

“I actually feel like drama is a lot easier than comedy,” he said, acknowledging the irony of playing serious scenes with fellow comedian Zach Galifianakis, who appears in the show as a ruthless tech billionaire.

“Zach and I would kind of whisper to each other on set, like, are we getting away with something here?” Corddry revealed. “Are we fooling everyone? Because this is going well.”

As he gets older, Corddry said he’s seen how “the showbiz machine starts thinking of you in a different way,” adding, “You get some gray hair, and you assume more gravitas.”

While AMC has now officially picked up The Audacity for a second season, the events of the Season 1 finale make it very unlikely that Corddry’s character could return for more. But that doesn’t mean he’s done with drama.

“Listen, I’ll give you whatever you want,” he joked. “What do you got? I’ll do it. And I don’t really think there’s a lot of difference between the two, at least in the way that I prepare. I prepared just as much for Hot Tub Time Machine as I did for The Audacity. I approach it the same way.”

The same goes for Corddry’s surprise return to The Daily Show with his former boss, Jon Stewart, this past December. Riffing on his Hot Tub Time Machine franchise, Corddry “time-traveled” from 2005 to help highlight how little has actually changed in American politics over the past two decades.

“It was wild, because over the last 10 years or so, I was on, but as a guest, which was surreal in itself,” Corddry said. But he had never come back as a guest correspondent because, he explained, Stewart’s successor, Trevor Noah, “didn’t want to do bits with old correspondents.”

“Understandably so,” Corddry conceded. “This was his show now, and he wanted to make it that. And I totally understood, but I missed it. I definitely missed it. But with Jon being back, I was so excited to finally get the call.”

“And my God, I had a blast,” he continued. “And it’s so different, of course. I just realize now how much money we didn’t have shooting that show back then. Like there’s a costume department with costumes in it! We had nothing. We had to buy our own suits. So it was amazing.”

The Audacity is streaming now on AMC+.