Mary Jo Catlett

Mary Jo Catlett originated a role on Broadway in 1964, as Ernestina in Hello, Dolly!, which means her career began in the American musical theatre and has now outlasted almost everyone who was in that building. Television took her next, most durably as Pearl Gallagher, the third housekeeper on Diff'rent Strokes.

Since 1999 she has been Mrs. Puff, SpongeBob SquarePants's long-suffering boating instructor, and the sheer quantity of it is hard to hold in your head. The series, the theatrical films, Kamp Koral, The Patrick Star Show, Kreepaway Kamp, Saving Bikini Bottom, Plankton: The Movie: she has voiced the same character for more than a quarter of a century, which puts her among the longest-serving performers in American animation without anyone ever noticing her name.

The live-action work is a parade of small, sharply played women. Rosemary Ackerman in Serial Mom, Rita in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Josie in The Champ, Earlene in Semi-Tough, Mrs. Ellwood in The Benchwarmers, Mrs. Applebaum on That's So Raven, a shopkeeper, a nurse, a grandmother. She was in Bananas in 1971, uncredited, cheering in a hotel lobby. It is exactly the sort of career that keeps American comedy running, and it has a Broadway original at one end and a cartoon pufferfish at the other.