Andy Richter

Andy Richter's job description, for most of his career, has been the man sitting to Conan O'Brien's left. He was there when Late Night launched in 1993, left it, and was brought back years later for The Tonight Show and then Conan on TBS, which makes him one of very few sidekicks a host went out of his way to hire twice.

The framing undersells him badly. He starred in Andy Richter Controls the Universe, a single-camera comedy built entirely around his particular flavour of deadpan, and on Arrested Development he played a heightened version of himself plus a set of identical brothers, a joke that only works because Richter can make one face mean five different things.

To a generation of children he is Mort, the tiny lemur in the Madagascar films, whose voice sits somewhere between a toddler and a smoke alarm. He has carried it through the features, the spin-offs and the holiday specials, and it is the most commercially valuable thing he does.

The film work is a long list of second bananas in studio comedies, Elf, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, where he is dropped in to absorb the lead's energy and hand back a better joke than the script had written. Since 2019 he has hosted his own interview podcast, The Three Questions, which turns out to suit him: the sidekick's real skill was always listening, and a podcast is nothing but that.