Sick kids get laughs

Rob Corddry takes the hot, racy medical
drama trope to a new, weird place with
Children’s Hospital

ER BIZARRE: Corddry (in clown face)
and cast of Children’s Hospital

by CHRIS BARRY

When you think about what passes for humour on TV and in film these days, it’s hard not to feel a touch of sympathy for the few comedic actors out there who are actually funny. Of course, you’ve got to work and hopefully keep your name in the spotlight, but think of how few vehicles there’ve been in recent memory that any self-respecting funnyman would want to attach their names to. The Sandler/Spade/Schneider/etcetera embarrassment Grown Ups? A recurring role on Dan for Mayor? Let’s face it, there ain’t much out there.

So you’ve got to hand it to Rob Corddry, not just for pretty well being consistently funny, but for having the luck and/or talent and/or foresight to continually attach himself to better than average projects, beginning with his stint on The Daily Show (2002–2006) and continuing through his appearances in films like Old School (2003), Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (2006) right on up to this year’s Hot Tub Time Machine, which, while hardly a masterpiece, still manages to elicit the odd chuckle now and again, more often than not when Corddry’s on screen.

“Well, thank you, but that’s all over now,” Corddry assures me, “and also let me direct your attention to movies I’ve been in like Failure to Launch and the Adventures of Chuck and Larry or whatever the fuck it was called. As you get older, you realize integrity means nothing. The people with the most integrity are usually novelists who end up shooting themselves. So you’ll be seeing me in a lot more shit soon. I’ve realized first and foremost that I want my kids to be healthy and have good lives.”

Among said shit Corddry will be unleashing on the public is a new TV series on the Adult Swim network called Children’s Hospital, much of which Corddry either wrote, directed and/or produced. “It’s about a group of very sexy doctors all looking to have sex with each other in inappropriate places, this being a children’s hospital and everything.”

Corddry says he got the idea for the show while sitting in the waiting room of a Los Angeles hospital, tending to his daughter who had just dislocated her arm. “It was just one of those very simple perfect ideas that hit me in a flash, like, ‘Boy, this sure isn’t funny.’ It was almost a challenge, like, ‘Can you make this, the saddest thing in the world, funny?’”

As for whether it will ever air in Canada, Corddry remains unsure. “You know, I never even thought of that,” he says. “All I know is they asked me if I wanted to do the Montreal comedy festival and I was, like, ‘Yeah, I love that town, let’s go!’ I never considered it might be a fruitless endeavour with respect to publicity and marketing.”

And while JFL is selling the spectacle as a live rendition of Children’s Hospital, Corddry says that’s only one idea he and fellow cast members Erin Hayes and Jonathan Stern are throwing around. “For sure we’ll be screening three never-before-seen episodes of it and doing a Q&A afterwards, but we’ll only decide what the show is going to be once we get there and get a feel from the theatre. We’ll be doing a lot of bits though, and yeah, I’m sure some of them will be from Children’s Hospital, perhaps even with members of the audience participating.”

ROB CORDDRY PERFORMS IN
CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL AT PLACE DES
ARTS 5E SALLE (175 STE-CATHERINE W.)
ON SATURDAY, JULY 17, 7 P.M., $30.62