Rob Schrab

Schrab arrived from comics. He created Scud: The Disposable Assassin, a book about a disposable robot killer, and the sensibility in it, cartoon carnage played with a completely straight face, survives in almost everything he has made since.

The bridge to screen work was Channel 101, the competitive short-film festival he co-founded, where an audience voted on five-minute pilots and the winners earned the right to make another episode. That system produced Yacht Rock, a comedy about the making of soft rock in which Schrab himself turns up as Huey Lewis, and it produced the collaborators who carried him into television. He co-wrote the feature Monster House, then co-created Comedy Central's The Sarah Silverman Program and directed three seasons of it.

Directing is the actual trade. He has episodes of Community, Parks and Recreation, The Mindy Project, Workaholics, Childrens Hospital, Blue Mountain State, Creepshow and the second revival season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 behind him, which describes a specific and valuable skill: shooting an absurd premise without signalling to the audience that you know it is absurd. Those directing jobs are not what this page collects. What it collects is the acting, and the acting is mostly favours, voice cameos and one-scene parts in shows made by people he knows.

The result is a career built sideways rather than upward. No signature series of his own, but a hand in a surprising number of the American comedies that mattered between 2005 and 2020.