I admit to you that she wasn’t one of the writers, which is probably why she hadn’t had some of the same opportunities as the guys. She also spent most of her time delivering straight lines, sort of a Margaret Dumont to the guys’ Marx Brothers. The straight man gets no respect, especially when she’s a woman, I think. And she so often is. Still, these guys knew their limits, and when they came up against them, one of the things they did was call in Carol Cleveland.

To my great astonishment, I might know people who went to grade school with her. Although born in London, she spent her childhood first in Philadelphia and Lubbock and then in Pasadena, California. She is 76, two years older than my mother—who grew up in Arcadia and therefore wasn’t likely to have known her—but went to Marshall and Pasadena High School. She returned to London in 1960. She puttered around for several years, doing movies and TV, before her appearing on a brand-new TV show in 1969.

Okay, not quite. She wasn’t on “Whither Canada,” the first episode. But she was on “Sex and Violence,” the second, already playing two roles. Sometimes, she was allowed to be funny; for my money, one of the greatest moments of the show is her utter heartbreak when she wails, “But it’s my only line!” Mostly, she was there to be a woman when they needed an actual woman instead of one of the guys in drag. (I tend to feel the reason the Kids in the Hall didn’t have their own Carol Cleveland has a lot to do with how pretty Dave Foley was.) Still, they brought her in and stuck with her.

Yes, all right, quite a lot of what she did was stand around and be sexy. She had some awfully skimpy costumes over the years, which was the joke about half the time. “Look, it’s Carol Cleveland in hardly any clothes at all on a beach which is supposed to be the Antarctic for reasons!” Yeah, okay. On the other hand, she also wore Victorian and medieval clothing as required, so they knew there was more to her than her figure—which she well knew didn’t interest Graham Chapman at all. That made her somewhat uncomfortable; he was probably the first openly gay man she knew. But she liked the drinking less.

She will never top my list of great comediennes. I’m not even sure she’s a great comedic actress, which is a subtly different category. I think she’s funny, but I think as much as anything that, like Margaret Dumont before her, she found a group of people with whom she worked really well. It’s not just that I’m not terribly familiar with her career, I think; it’s that she was in something iconic, and she’ll always be associated with it. I don’t think it bothers her terribly, either.

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