Jane Curtin

It must have been deeply frustrating to be on the early years of Saturday Night Live and care about things like, you know, rehearsal. Being sensible on that set must have been rough on you. Being sensible on that set and still going out and being dynamite at what you did and having on-screen rapport with the coworkers who were driving you nuts with their attitude and their drug use would have taken skill. And then to have all of that and continually be overlooked in favour of your flashier, wilder coworkers just seems unfair. And yet.

Jane Curtin was born into a perfectly normal Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts. She attended the Newton Day School of the Sacred Heart. She got an AA from Elizabeth Seton Junior College. She was working toward a BA at Northeastern University when she dropped out to go into comedy. She initially joined a group called The Proposition; she then appeared in an off-Broadway play she cowrote with, among others, future Love Boat star and Representative Fred Gandy. Then, after a tough audition in which she beat Mimi Kennedy, she became one of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players; in that same year, she married her husband, to whom she stayed married until his death almost exactly fifty years later.

She was great on SNL. She got put in as the straight woman a lot, because that group needed someone in the role, but she could also be extremely funny. It’s a dry wit a lot of the time, but if that’s your bag, that can be funnier than the anarchy going on around her. I can actually hear her voice in my head with several of her lines. And, yes, Dan Aykroyd calling her an ignorant slut, there’s that, too, but I can call up her deliberately broad “Ten thousand nuns and orphans? What’s so bad about that?” without even trying.

Unlike her colleagues from those years, Curtin mostly stayed in television. Kate & Allie and 3rd Rock From the Sun each ran six seasons, and she’s got a recurring character in The Librarians. My partner’s hot take is that Curtin is actually the best part of 3rd Rock. While I’m not sure I’d agree—I adore the relationship between Sally and Don—she’s certainly underrated. Again, she’s expected to be the straight woman, and again she’s good at it, and again no one notices when she’s actually being funny. It’s the straight woman’s burden; ask Margaret Dumont.

She’s kept working. She won a quarter-million dollars for UNICEF on Jeopardy! She placed second in their celebrity invitational tournament. She’s worked on the stage—I would’ve loved to see her as Dotty Ottley in Noises Off! She is a comedy icon, brought in for her place in television history but kept on for her skill. Sure. She was Prymaat Conehead. But more importantly, she is Jane Curtin.