Joel McHale
Joel McHale is an actor, born 1971.
Joel McHale spent eleven years hosting The Soup, a weekly half hour of televised contempt for other television, and the job shaped everything he has done since. It requires you to read out someone else's garbage on camera and make the reading itself the joke, and McHale got very good at one specific tone: pleased with himself, and slightly ashamed of being pleased with himself.
Community hired that tone and then took it apart. Jeff Winger is a disbarred lawyer who talks his way out of everything, and the running project of six seasons is arranging situations where charm is useless. It is the best thing he has done and probably the best use anyone will find for him, because the character is built from the same materials as his stand-up persona and then punctured weekly.
The film career has never found an equivalent. He is a good sport in bad comedies, from Blended to Spy Kids: All the Time in the World to The Happytime Murders, and sharp in small doses in better ones: a bank manager in Spider-Man 2, a straight-faced FBI agent opposite Matt Damon in The Informant! Increasingly he gets cast as a smug antagonist, because he can be disliked on purpose. The best recent example is David Fields in The Bear, the New York chef who exists mainly in flashback to explain why the lead cannot stop apologising to himself. He has also become the animated Mortal Kombat films' resident Johnny Cage, which is casting so obvious it is almost a compliment.
Movies (35)
- Scream 7 (2026)
- Stop! That! Train! (2026)
- Ted (2012)
- Blended (2014)
- Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge (2020)
- Spider-Man 2 (2004)
- Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms (2021)
- Mortal Kombat Legends: Cage Match (2023)
- Open Season 2 (2008)
- Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011)
- Deliver Us from Evil (2014)
- What's Your Number? (2011)
- The Informant! (2009)
- The Big Year (2011)
- Queenpins (2021)
- Trouble (2019)
- The Happytime Murders (2018)
- Assassination Nation (2018)
- Becky (2020)
- Game Over, Man! (2018)
- Advanced Television Production - 5 Days, 2 Scripts, No Sleep (2014)
- Happily (2021)
- A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018)
- The Onion Movie (2008)
- A Merry Friggin' Christmas (2014)
- Psych 2: Lassie Come Home (2020)
- Adult Beginners (2014)
- Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox (2025)
- Harmontown (2014)
- Parachute (2024)
TV (44)
- The Kelly Clarkson Show (2019)
- The Bear (2022)
- Conan (2010)
- The Jennifer Hudson Show (2022)
- The Late Late Show with James Corden (2015)
- Community (2009)
- The Masked Singer (2019)
- Iron Chef America (2005)
- DC's Stargirl (2020)
- The Soup (2004)
- Milo Murphy's Law (2016)
- The $100,000 Pyramid (2016)
- To Tell the Truth (2016)
- Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja (2012)
- Match Game (2016)
- Santa Clarita Diet (2017)
- Animal Control (2023)
- The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (2009)
- Running Wild with Bear Grylls (2014)
- Almost Live! (1984)
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (2020)
- The Huntress (2000)
- Hollywood Squares (2025)
- Billy on the Street (2011)
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 (2017)
- Is It Cake? (2022)
- E!'s 101 (2003)
- Last Comic Standing (2003)
- The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale (2018)
- I Can See Your Voice (2020)
Where to start with Joel McHale
Community first, and stay past the opening handful of episodes, which is where the show works out that Jeff Winger is funnier when his charm fails than when it lands. Six seasons, wildly uneven, and the peaks are as good as American network comedy gets.
After that the picture scatters. The Informant! is the best film on his shelf and he is very funny in it without ever raising his voice. The Bear uses him for a handful of scenes and gets more out of him than most of his leading roles. Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge is exactly as silly as it sounds and his Johnny Cage is the right sort of smug.
For the rest, Ted and Spider-Man 2 are cameos worth clocking, and The Happytime Murders is a warning.
The television leads
Community is the role, and Jeff Winger works because McHale plays the vanity absolutely straight. Santa Clarita Diet and Stargirl are the other series regulars, and The Bear uses him for two scenes of pure contempt that land perfectly.
The films
The film career is mostly supporting comic parts. The Informant is the outlier and the best of them, a Steven Soderbergh film in which he plays an FBI agent entirely without jokes. Spider-Man 2 is the early credit nobody remembers.
The animation and genre work
He voices Johnny Cage across the animated Mortal Kombat films, casting so obvious it is almost a joke. Becky is the surprise on this list: a nasty little thriller in which he is playing it entirely straight.