Ed McMahon

McMahon flew combat missions before he ever stood beside a desk holding a coffee mug. He came out of that into announcing, and in 1958 he and Johnny Carson began working together on the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, a partnership that lasted four years there and thirty more on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, from 1962 to 1992.

The job he did barely has a name. An announcer introduces the host; McMahon did that and then stayed on camera for the rest of the hour as a laugh, a reaction shot and a safety net. His actual skill was timing a response so it lifted someone else's joke instead of competing with it, several nights a week, for three decades, without ever appearing bored by it. Carson was better with him there, which is the whole argument.

Away from the desk he hosted the talent show Star Search, and he had a long second life as a familiar face for hire: himself in Muppets Tonight, Living Single and The Weather Man, a cartoon version of himself opposite the lab mice in Pinky and the Brain, assorted voices in I Am Weasel. The straight acting is scarcer and more interesting than its reputation. He is a passenger on a terrorised subway car in The Incident, and a genuinely unsettling one, and he plays an executive in Fun with Dick and Jane and Mr. Gillespie in Butterfly.