Throughout Saturday Night Live’s history there have been plenty of breakout scene stealers who have gone on to comedy stardom like John Belushi, Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell, but there have also been some great and very underrated comedians on the show who excel at playing the “straight man.” Seth Meyers, Kenan Thompson and Mikey Day are examples of people who are great at this, often in ways that are essential to the humor of a scene. But the first great straight man in the show’s history was actually a woman. Her name was Jane Curtin and she was one of the keys to SNL’s early success in the seventies.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-born comedian was educated at Northeastern University but she dropped out in 1968 (a year after she arrived) to pursue comedy professionally, first performing with a group called The Proposition, a clever and locally popular group of young improv artists who performed sketches with audience participation. It was popular enough that it expanded to New York, which led to Jane Curtin’s discovery by Lorne Michaels who hired her to join the cast of the sketch variety series Saturday Night Live as one of the show’s first cast members, remaining there for the first five seasons from 1975 to 1980.

As a reflection of her actual personality, Curtin would often play the straight woman in SNL sketches, often reacting to the more manic and silly characters around her (she had the strongest comedic chemistry with Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner). Although Curtin is a great actress and she was no less capable of delivering jokes with expert timing and earning plenty of laughs herself.

Curtin was unsurprisingly the most disciplined and sensible member of SNL‘s cast off screen, and she was often disgusted by the drug-induced behavior of those around her (she and Belushi got along with each other about as well as you would expect them to). Also unlike most of her SNL co-stars, Curtin mostly stayed in the realm of television throughout her career, rather than venturing into film. Although she did appear in a few high-profile films, including the 1993 sci-fi comedy Coneheads for which Curtin and Aykroyd reprised their SNL characters Prymaat and Beldar, DreamWorks Animation’s Antz (1998) for which she and Aykroyd teamed up once again to voice two wasps, the 2005 drama Brooklyn Lobster in a lead role opposite Danny Aiello, Disney’s Tim Allen comedy The Shaggy Dog (2006), the Paul Rudd and Jason Segel comedy I Love You, Man (2009), Paul Feig’s buddy cop film The Heat (2013) starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, the Lee Israel biodrama Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) also starring McCarthy, Disney’s holiday-themed comedy Godmothered (2020) and most recently the sci-fi comedy Jules (2023).

As for her television career, after Curtin left SNL in 1980, she was cast alongside Susan Saint James in the CBS sitcom Kate & Allie, which ran for six seasons from 1984 to 1989 and revolved around two recently divorced women, the free-spirited Kate (James) and the more conservative Allie (Curtin) who share a brownstone in NYC’s Greenwich Village and decide to raise their families together. It was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed sitcoms of the eighties and Curtin even won two Emmy Awards for Best Actress in a Comedy Series two years in a row.

Curtin returned to NBC in 1990 when she was cast as a single parent in the sitcom Working It Out, but that one only lasted 13 episodes. She had more success as a recurring cast member on another NBC sitcom called 3rd Rock from the Sun (1996-2001) as Dr. Mary Albright, the human on-and-off girlfriend of John Lithgow’s Dick Solomon.

Curtin later played Charlene in the 2004 TV film The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, a fantasy adventure film that aired on TNT and starred Noah Wyle as a college student who gets more than he bargained for when he accepts a job position at the Metropolitan Public Library and finds out he has to prevent a magical item called the Spear of Destiny from falling into the hands of a cult known as the Serpent Brotherhood (think low-budget Indiana Jones). Curtin would reprise her role as the first guardian of the “Librarian” in The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines (2006), The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008) and finally the TNT series The Librarians which starred Rebecca Romijn and ran for four seasons from 2014 to 2018.

Curtin also had a recurring role in the CBS crime drama Unforgettable, she played Judge Farley in both The Good Wife and its spin-off The Good Fight, she starred in two short-lived ABC sitcoms Crumbs and United We Fall, plus she had guest voice roles in Hercules: The Animated Series, Recess and Cyberchase and made guest appearances in Gary Unmarried, Broad City, Roseanne spin-off The Conners, Pete Davidson comedy Bupkis (which was produced by Lorne Michaels) and Netflix mystery comedy The Residence.

It’s interesting that Jane Curtin initially didn’t want to move to New York back in the seventies when The Proposition first expanded there because she loved her life in Cambridge so much. But now look at her. She continues to find acting work to this day, she has won multiple accolades throughout her career and is now considered a comedy legend by TV viewers around the country.