Loni Love

Loni Love had a whole other career before this one. She worked as an electrical engineer, moved into music engineering, and only then went full time into stand-up, which is a route into comedy that almost nobody takes. She was runner-up on Star Search in 2003 and, by 2009, was on both Variety's and Comedy Central's lists of comics to watch. The Detroit background and the engineering years show up in the act: her comedy is built on being the most practical person in a room full of people who are not.

Television is where that landed best. She spent years co-hosting the syndicated daytime show The Real, which ended in 2022, and the format suited her, since panel talk rewards whoever can be funny quickly without a script. The same skill runs through her judging and panel work: Is It Cake?, The Wheel, Pictionary, and a celebrity run at Secret Celebrity RuPaul's Drag Race.

Her screen acting is mostly comic support and she is good at it in a specific way, arriving with one scene's worth of energy and leaving before it thins out. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, Soul Plane, Mother's Day, both Bad Asses sequels as Carmen, Rose the lunch lady on Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. The outlier, and the most interesting credit on the list, is Adopt a Highway, a quiet 2019 drama where the comic timing is switched off entirely.