D.L. Hughley

Stand-up came first and never stopped. Hughley hosted BET's ComicView in its early years, built a national name on the road, and was one of the four comics billed together in The Original Kings of Comedy, which is not among the credits listed here. That grounding explains the screen career better than any single role does: he performs like a man used to the audience answering back, and the parts that work are the ones that leave room for it.

The Hughleys, the sitcom built around him and named after him, is the centre of the acting work. He plays a version of himself, a man who has moved his family somewhere more comfortable than the place he came from and cannot stop noticing what that costs. The film work is broader and thinner: the voice of the Gadgetmobile in both Inspector Gadget pictures, John Wilson in Scary Movie 3, Johnny in Soul Plane, Rodrigo in Chasing Papi, Derrick West in The Brothers, Dexter in Cat Run.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is the outlier and the one to argue about. Cast as Simon Stiles, a sketch-show star inside a drama about television, he was given a character with opinions and the room to state them, and he was noticeably better at that than the surrounding comedies ever let him be. Since then the work has drifted back towards commentary: news and panel television, radio, and a run of documentaries about Black American comedy where he speaks as a historian of his own trade rather than as a performer.