Harland Williams

Harland Williams did stand-up in Toronto and then Los Angeles for years before his first film role, and the act never really left the performances. His debut was the state trooper in Dumb and Dumber (1994), which is a small part that people still quote three decades later, and the reason it lands is that he plays the trooper as a man having a completely ordinary day.

That is the whole technique. Williams performs characters with no visible inner commentary: they are not in on the joke, they are not signalling, they simply believe what they are saying. Kenny in Half Baked works because the panic is genuine. The psychopathic hitch-hiker in There's Something About Mary is funny because he is friendly. Even the lead in the Disney comedy RocketMan is played straight enough that the film has to catch up to him.

The rest of the 1990s and 2000s gave him a run of comic supporting parts: Down Periscope, Superstar, The Whole Nine Yards, Freddy Got Fingered, Sorority Boys, Employee of the Month. Then the voice career took over and turned out to suit him better than the camera did. He is Lug in Robots, Carl in Meet the Robinsons, the ketchup bottle in Sausage Party, and Mike in Gary & Mike, plus a long stretch of children's television, Puppy Dog Pals and Bunnicula and Oddballs among them. A comedian whose face keeps getting cast as a lunatic and whose voice keeps getting cast as a friend.