Playing Doctor with Rob Corddry

Did that bother of you?

Oh, I don’t care. I need a job. And to work with Oliver Stone and all those guys was amazing. I don’t care how people react to it, but I just thought it was interesting. It was also weird playing a guy whose time in office coincided with my term at The Daily Show. So it was weird that I had been eating, drinking, and sleeping this guy for three years at one point.

It must have been torture watching all The Daily Show election coverage without being a part of it.

Au contraire. I missed The Daily Show until the election season ramped up. No one wants to be a part of that. In 2004 I lived the life, at least physically, of an actual journalist and it was miserable. I looked around me at all these road journalists, you know the boys on the bus, who follow these campaigns around and didn’t see a happy face in the crowd—and I saw those faces over and over again. It’s miserable—it’s like covering the same sports game every day for two years. I thought we got some great content from it, but the process itself was just insufferable.

There’s no better place to be a part of The Daily Show election coverage than watching it from your couch.

“There’s no better place to be a part of The Daily Show election coverage than watching it from your couch.”

Do you think The Daily Show and SNL will be able to keep up their momentum now that we’ve elected a president almost everyone loves?

The Daily Show has always targeted hypocrisy overall, and no offense to people in your profession, but mostly the target for The Daily Show is the media and journalism and their failure over the last eight years, and I don’t think that is going to get any better. To tell you the truth, I think Saturday Night Live nailed it when they made fun of the media’s coverage of the debates and how they would favor Obama. I think it was a brilliant sketch and probably got closest to what we’ll see in the next four to eight years. But that depends on the media as well. They could be inspired to clean up their act, so to speak, and I think the worst thing that could happen for comedy is that the country heals. There wasn’t a lot of good comedy in the ’90s. And that was a pretty great time for America.

There has been a lot of talk about Childrens' Hospital mocking Grey’s Anatomy and ER. To what extent did you intentionally write that into your scripts?

It’s directly a parody of the hospital genre and the modern television drama. The idea came from a series of horrible things that I saw at Childrens' Hospital in Los Angeles: for instance, seeing a small body on a gurney being pushed by a bunch of doctors and nurses yelling “Stabbed!” It reminded me how inappropriate the hospital genre is: What better way to highlight these doctors various flaws than with the curtain of death and sickness behind them? That these beautiful doctors, despite of all the sickness they come in contact with every day, still find time to bone each other? So I picked the most inappropriate place to set one of these hospital dramas.

My target audience is anyone who has never had actual experience with the Childrens' Hospital. I will say though, if you’ve ever had a kid with cancer, please don’t watch.

Now that Childrens' Hospital has premiered, what’s your dream next project?

Anything that pays me a ton of money, because Daddy is in the red. Just bought a house and don’t have a job. At least I will hopefully have the opportunity to do a really crappy movie and make a lot of money I’m not worthy of.

Note: This article has been corrected to note that Joss Whedon produced Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, not Josh Whedon as originally published.

Miriam Datskovsky is an associate editor at The Daily Beast. Her work has also appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio, New York magazine, and nymag.com.