Blake Anderson

Mail Order Comedy was a sketch troupe with a rap group attached. Blake Anderson helped start it in 2006 alongside Anders Holm, Adam DeVine and Kyle Newacheck, they put videos online, and one of the recurring bits was a band called Wizard Sleeve. Five years later the same four men were making a Comedy Central series about four men who behave exactly like that.

Workaholics ran from 2011 to 2017 across seven seasons, with Anderson co-creating it and playing a version of himself named Blake Henderson. Born in Sacramento in 1984, he has one of the most specific comic instruments on television: the hair, the half-second delay, the delivery of a genuinely stupid idea with total sincerity and no wink at the camera. It only does one thing, but almost nobody else does that thing as cleanly.

The film career has mostly rented the persona out in small doses: a beer pong guy in Neighbors, a janitor in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, a cousin in The Out-Laws, a lead in Game Over, Man! alongside his Workaholics co-stars. The interesting exception is Dope, where he plays Will Sherwood and the film puts that same stoner register into a story with actual stakes. The other exception is voice work, which frees him from his own face: Matthew Holt in Voltron: Legendary Defender is a real supporting performance, while Dagda in Epic, Hogarth in Penn Zero and a pigeon in Show Dogs pay the bills. He has since settled comfortably into judging jobs on Is It Cake? and elsewhere, which is a fair use of a man that likable.