Howard Morris

You have almost certainly heard Howard Morris without knowing it. Born in the Bronx in 1919, he made his name as one of Sid Caesar's regulars on Your Show of Shows, where a celebrated 1954 sketch had him playing Uncle Goopy, and he stayed in the Caesar orbit as a live-television comic with an unusually physical style.

Then two second careers. On The Andy Griffith Show he played Ernest T. Bass, a guest part that grew far past its screen time and is still the first thing most American viewers name. And in animation he became one of the busiest voices of the era: Atom Ant, Gopher in the Winnie the Pooh shorts, Breezly Bruin on The Peter Potamus Show, Melvin Peebles on The Magilla Gorilla Show, parts on The Flintstones and The Jetsons, then a whole second wave decades later with Bogel on The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, Wade on Garfield and Friends, Flem on Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel, and work on DuckTales, TaleSpin, Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers, Gummi Bears and Bionic Six.

The live-action film work ran alongside all of it: The Nutty Professor in 1963, 40 Pounds of Trouble, Boys' Night Out, Splash in 1984, and three Mel Brooks comedies in High Anxiety, History of the World: Part I and Life Stinks. He also directed for television. He died in 2005, having spent half a century being the funniest person in someone else's scene.