The Best Non-‘Daily Show’ Comedic Performances by ‘Daily Show’ Anchors and Correspondents
“Theracide,” the first of this week’s two episodes of Adults to air* on FX, explores typically challenging territory for the show’s questionably adult characters. Samir (Malik Elassal) and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) get too attached to a group of high schoolers who’ve convinced gig worker Samir to deliver them beer. Billie (Lucy Freyer) gets way too nervous meeting her older boyfriend’s adult friends and tries to overcompensate with bawdy jokes.
Anton (Owen Thiele) and Issa (Amita Rao) have the most grown-up problem, which they attempt to resolve by the most childish means: George, their mutual therapist, has suddenly died, and to determine whether their nonsense drove him to suicide, Issa hires a medium. Anton is right to doubt that Taryn is on the level, not only because she’s claiming she can communicate with the dead but because she’s doing so with a Ouija board she probably bought at Target and she didn’t bother learning how to spell “George” before she got there.
Taryn may suck at this hustle, but she’s played by someone who’s very gifted at comedy: Grace Kuhlenschmidt, who was already a star on TikTok and Instagram when she débuted on The Daily Show in late 2023. Popping up outside the TDS studio puts Kuhlenschmidt in excellent company: Daily Show correspondents (of whom she is officially one, as of last year) tend to stay busy as comedy actors. To prove it, here’s an alphabetical list of the comedy performances you most urgently need to see from 25 Daily Show correspondent alumni, determined solely by my personal preferences.
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* Yes, the whole season already dropped on Hulu back on May 29th, but they’re doing this too, so let’s pretend it’s the past and/or that you don’t know anyone who’d give you their Hulu .
Dan Bakkedahl in ‘Veep ’
HBO’s Veep — the story of unremarkable U.S. Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and the moronic vulgarians the job requires her to meet — was notable for the diversity of profanity its many bastards unleashed. As Congressman Roger Furlong, Dan Bakkedahl still managed to be one of its biggest monsters, a cynical opportunist steadily eroding his aide Will’s (Nelson Franklin) will to live.
Mary Birdsong in ‘Adventureland ’
Period dramedy Adventureland is primarily the story of aimless Oberlin grad James (Jesse Eisenberg) and the crush he develops on Em (Kristen Stewart) when they both end up working at the same downmarket theme park. But we do learn a little about the characters who surround them, like Francy (Birdsong), the stepmother whose relationship with Em’s father (Josh Pais) started when he was still technically married to his now-dead wife. Stepmothers don’t usually get flattering portrayals in pop culture, but… Just kidding, this applies to Francy, too.
Lewis Black in ‘Inside Out ’
Some viewers may have known Black from his “Back in Black” straight-to-camera desk rants before they even knew he was a stand-up comic. So when the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out needed to cast someone as the personification of Anger, Black was a natural choice. He must have felt pretty happy about the experience off-screen, since he’s one of the few original cast to have returned for the sequel last year.
Nancy Carell in ‘The Office ’
The former Nancy Walls doesn’t appear on screen much these days (and if I were married to Steve Carell, I probably wouldn’t strain to book acting roles either); she was an executive producer on Angie Tribeca, so at least she’s still contributing to culture. But if you want to see her face, she guest-starred opposite her spouse in seven episodes of The Office, playing his character Michael’s realtor-turned-girlfriend Carol. I’ll never forget the moment she realizes Michael’s misappropriation of Diwali has led to her attending a Hindu celebration dressed up as a cheerleader.
Steve Carell in ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin ’
Carell followed his scene-stealing role as simpleton Brick in Anchorman by playing the titular role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Though a premise as high-concept as this one could have been only crass, co-writers Carell and Judd Apatow find the moments of sweetness and vulnerability in Andy, an electronics-store clerk who’s given up on the idea of ever having sex, and the colleagues-turned-friends who convince him it’s still worth pursuing.
Wyatt Cenac in ‘People of Earth ’
StarCrossed is a group for “experiencers” of alien abduction, so they’re accustomed to meeting new people who don’t believe their stories — like Ozzie (Cenac), a New York City journalist who travels upstate to Beacon to write a cynical piece about their delusions. However, the more time he spends with them, the more Ozzie comes to realize he is an experiencer himself; and the viewer comes to understand that everything the think happened to them definitely did. Cenac’s deadpan manner makes him the perfect choice for a converted skeptic.
Ronny Chieng in ‘Interior Chinatown ’
I am the world’s foremost proponent of Doogie Kameāloha, M.D., the Doogie Howser, M.D. sequel that changed the child prodigy into a teen girl practicing medicine in Hawaii, and in which Chieng played an arrogant heart surgeon who works at the same hospital. So when I say that is NOT the performance of Chieng’s that you most need to see, you should understand how special Interior Chinatown actually is. Jimmy O. Yang plays protagonist Willis Wu, who gradually figures out the world he’s grown up in isn’t exactly what it seems. Chieng is Fatty Choi, Willis’s best friend, and though he does achieve a strange kind of microfame by being rude to delighted customers at the restaurant where he works, playing a cheerfully unassuming sidekick is a departure from the confident jerks Chieng tends to specialize in. (Seriously though, if you have tweens or teens, watch Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. with them!)
Stephen Colbert in ‘Strangers With Candy ’
One of TV’s blackest comedies ever, Strangers With Candy follows Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris, who co-created the show with Colbert, Paul Dinello and Mitch Rouse), a supposedly reformed “boozer, a , and a loser” who’s trying to complete her education attending high school alongside teenagers despite being close to 50 herself. Colbert plays Chuck Noblet, Jerri’s history teacher; though he has a wife and son at home, he’s embroiled in a secret love affair with art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck (Dinello). Knowing how long Colbert and Sedaris have been friends and trusted collaborators makes it even funnier whenever Mr. Noblet’s treatment of Jerri is openly abusive.
Nate Corddry in ‘30 Rock ’
The only reason I’m not using this platform to endorse Nate Corddry in AppleTV+’s spectacularly dopey For All Mankind is that it’s not technically a comedy. So instead, I’ll point you to the Season Four 30 Rock episode “Sun Tea.” Liz (Tina Fey) hatches a scheme to get her upstairs neighbor Brian (Corddry) to move out so that she can acquire his apartment and combine it with hers. Brian turns out to be extremely principled, and makes it known he won’t take a bribe; they end up living together, whereupon Liz tries to make his life unbearable with her erratic behavior, but he turns out to be very understanding about her (fake) menstrual ups and downs and apprehends a fake burglar because he’s also a cop. Brian’s many attributes don’t quite line up logically — he has integrity, but he’s a cop?!?! — but Corddry plays them all adorably.
Rob Corddry in ‘Childrens Hospital ’
Nate’s older brother Rob is a prolific character actor, so it would be hard to select the absolute pinnacle of his comedy career if I hadn’t seen him play Dr. Blake Downs in Childrens Hospital, which he also created. A spoof of hospital shows that boils the genre’s many tropes down to episodes shorter than 15 minutes, Childrens finds Corddry treating his young patients with “the healing power of laughter,” including face makeup in the style of John Wayne Gacy’s Pogo the Clown. Lunacy has seldom been this committed.
Josh Gad in ‘New Girl ’
I’m sure Frozen, in which Gad voices the snowman Olaf, has its proponents. Maybe you know children who own his image on T-shirts, lunchboxes and beach towels. Olaf is fine. Olaf is no Bearclaw. In three episodes of New Girl, Gad embodies Bearclaw, a bar back at the Los Angeles bar where Nick (Jake Johnson) works. In Gad’s first episode, Nick misunderstands Jess (Zooey Deschanel) when she tries to get Nick to set her up with a more conventionally attractive colleague, but Bearclaw’s bleary-eyed intensity — a Gad specialty — can’t help intriguing her a little.
Rachael Harris in ‘Friends ’
As anyone might expect, when the moment finally comes for Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) to deliver her baby, it becomes a multi-episode affair, including a succession of laboring mothers and birth partners coming in and out of the shared hospital room while Rachel barely makes progress. One such pair is played by Harris and Tim DeKay (probably best known to readers of this site as Bizarro Jerry from Seinfeld). This isn’t their first baby, and they’re a little too eager to share what they know about the process with Rachel and Ross (David Schwimmer). Harris only gets a tiny amount of screen time, but she does a lot with it, including nonverbally.
Ed Helms in ‘The Office ’
When The Office expanded its scope to include other locations of the Dunder Mifflin paper company, we meet Andy (Helms), new co-worker to Jim (John Krasinski) at the Stamford office. Andy is the scion of a wealthy family, a ionate alumnus of Cornell University, a semi-retired a cappella singer, and a deeply repressed pit of rage in the form of a human man, nearly always on the verge of springing forth to bite someone’s head off. Andy is complicated yet simple, and Helms’s lived-in performance made him feel like he’d been on the show all along.
Jason Jones in ‘How I Met Your Mother ’
Some of you took until the insane Vows column about Josh Radnor’s January 2024 wedding to turn on him. The rest of us who watched How I Met Your Mother have been against him all along thanks to Ted, the drip of a character he played for many more seasons than you probably . One of the many women Ted dates before meeting the titular mother is Stella (Sarah Chalke), a divorced dermatologist and single mother who (spoiler) isn’t entirely over her ex, Tony (Jones). Stella’s decision not to marry Ted in favor of a reunion with Tony would be indignity enough for the likes of Ted, but! He comes back later as the screenwriter of a romcom based on Ted’s courtship of Stella, transformed into an even bigger putz. Tony, you magnificent bastard: You got his ass.
Craig Kilborn in ‘Old School ’
In Old School, our hero is Mitch (Luke Wilson), a guy trying to recapture the unbridled debauchery of his college years in order to get over his cheating ex. Establishing an unsanctioned fraternity isn’t what we’d typically think of as irable, so Mark, Mitch’s rival for his old high school crush Nicole (Ellen Pompeo) has to be an even bigger scumbag. Fortunately for Mitch, Mark is played by Craig Kilborn, who’s probably a perfectly lovely person in real life but has definitely always projected an air of unearned entitlement. Not a likable performance, but a fully realized one.
Aasif Mandvi in ‘This Way Up ’
(Copy what I wrote above about Nate Corddry in For All Mankind; paste “Aasif Mandvi” and “Evil.”) This Way Up was created by Aisling Bea, who stars as Áine, an ESL teacher we meet just as she’s leaving residential treatment for a mental health breakdown. Áine’s tentative motions toward rebuilding her life are heavily dependent on Shona (Sharon Horgan), Áine’s older sister. As Shona’s live-in partner Vish, Mandvi doesn’t get tons to do other than be cute, ive and endlessly understanding, but that’s basically porn for women, so: good on him.
Hasan Minhaj in ‘No Hard Feelings ’
Only on the surface is No Hard Feelings the story of helicopter parents hiring an experienced older woman to usher their introverted son into manhood. In actuality, it’s the story of a lifelong resident of Montauk, New York being driven into light sex work because the encroachment of rich summer people is pricing her out of her family home. The face of predatory real-estate speculation belongs to Doug Khan (Minhaj), a high school classmate of the down-and-out Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence); he’s a jerk, but you can’t deny those cheekbones were made for flyers and bus benches!
Olivia Munn in ‘New Girl ’
Even though it’s clear from the series premiere that Nick and Jess are going to end up together — don’t yell at me, the show’s been out for over a decade — they both have to date some of the wrong people on their way to each other, and one of those wrong people for Nick is Angie. The opposite of Jess in nearly every way, Angie is overtly cool, traditionally sexy and more prone to adventures than a spontaneous showtune. Angie’s time in Nick’s life was short but memorable, and Munn made it seem effortless.
Trevor Noah in ‘This Is Me… Now ’
If This Is Me… Now — a screen project in which Jennifer Lopez plays “herself” as the foreman of a rose petal factory whose every move is presided over by a council of personified zodiac signs and her therapist is Fat Joe — is not a comedy, then nothing is. Anyway, Noah plays Libra and he seems to be having fun.
Rob Riggle in ‘21 Jump Street’ (2012)
The original 21 Jump Street was a young adult drama in which youthful-looking vice cops — including Johnny Depp in his breakout role — infiltrated high schools and tried to entrap actual teenagers who may or may not be involved in the drug trade. In other words, it was I.P. desperate to be reimagined as a comedy, which Chris Lord and Phil Miller (Clone High) did 25 years after its premiere. Riggle plays Mr. Walters, a gym teacher who’s very interested in getting undercover vice cop Jenko (Channing Tatum) on a sports team; amazingly, he manages not to get upstaged by his eyebrows in a very memorable scene.
Jon Stewart in ‘NewsRadio ’
With all due respect to Stewart’s performance as “himself” on The Larry Sanders Show as a rising talent in the late-night talk show world, I still have a soft spot for his role as Andrew in the third season of NewsRadio. Matthew (Andy Dick) is excited to welcome his brother Andrew to the station, and to get up to hijinks with him like they used to do as kids, since they’re… identical twins! When he’s on his own with Matthew’s co-workers, Andrew its that he knows they’re not identical twins, but that his parents kept up the ruse to make Matthew feel like he belongs, since Andrew is their biological child but Matthew is adopted. The truth turns out to be somewhat different than Andrew represents it, but Stewart is definitely credible as someone who finds an Andy Dick character’s antics tiresome.
Matt Walsh in ‘Veep ’
Whenever one sees anyone who’s been on Veep, one can probably go ahead and say it’s the best role on their CV. Certainly, that’s true for Walsh, who played Selina’s press secretary, a reliably unreliable idiot whose interventions with journalists tended to make sticky situations much worse for Selina than when he started. Mike’s arc of upward failure has him ending the series as the lead anchor of the CBS Evening News, which at the time was a job reporters actually wanted.
Lauren Weedman in ‘Hacks ’
One of the great joys of watching Hacks is how far it gets into the weeds of how business is conducted in Las Vegas. It takes a particular kind of tough old broad to thrive in the city’s local political scene, and the tough old broad we have come to know and love is Mayor Jo Pezzimenti (Weedman). Whereas previous seasons have had her making only brief pop-ins as a crony to Vegas fixture Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), the just-ended fourth season found her at the center of a nationally infamous sex scandal. It’s handy that helping her do a little reputation management also gives Deborah’s new late-night talk show a boost, but who could get mad at a win-win? In scenes big and small, Weedman is never less than hilariously fearless.
Jessica Williams in ‘Shrinking ’
Shrinking has frustrated and/or bored me when it seems like it’s trying too hard to teach me about therapy or even lead me to my own real-life mental health breakthroughs. When it’s just acting like the second coming of Cougar Town, it’s utterly charming. That’s the part of the show where Jessica Williams utterly thrives, which is kind of a shame for her patients since she’s playing one of the shrinks the title alludes to. I’d be just fine if she skipped those parts and focused on making friends — she seems like a great one.
Roy Wood Jr. in ‘Confess, Fletch’
The plot of Confess, Fletch is too twisty to even attempt to summarize here, not to mention that doing so would spoil the pleasures of watching it, which you should! All I’ll say is that Fletch is suspected of crimes he didn’t commit, and Sergeant Inspector Monroe (Wood) can’t quite manage being a total hardass with him. This is the most acting I’d seen Wood do and he is, quite frankly, a natural, even doing what they tell you never to do: share a scene with a kid.
