JB Smoove

Smoove was a writer before he was a star. Def Comedy Jam in 1995, then three years on Saturday Night Live's staff in the mid-2000s, which is a very different apprenticeship from the stand-up-to-sitcom route, and it shows in how he builds a bit. He constructs. He does not simply riff.

Leon is the reason for everything after. He turns up on Curb Your Enthusiasm as a houseguest who never leaves and becomes the only person on that show with more confidence than Larry David and no grounds for it. The performance is a machine for escalation: Leon starts a sentence on a plausible premise, and each clause gets louder, filthier and more certain until he has talked himself into advice no sane person would take. He played it, on and off, from 2007 to 2024.

Film has mostly asked him for one scene. He is the cab driver in Date Night, the jumpy science teacher chaperoning a school trip in two Spider-Man films, a bartender, an uncle, a talking mechanic, a voice in animated features. Top Five is the exception where somebody wrote him a real part. Television has been kinder: The Millers put him in a network sitcom, Harley Quinn lets him voice a foul-mouthed houseplant, and Blockbuster and The Last O.G. gave him ensembles to work inside.