Fred Armisen

Fred Armisen came out of music. He drummed in bands for years before comedy paid anything, and the timing never left him: his best characters are built on rhythm, on a pause held half a beat too long until it turns uncomfortable and then funny. A long run in the Saturday Night Live cast made him a professional impressionist, and Portlandia, which he co-created and co-starred in with Carrie Brownstein, gave him a form that suited him better than sketch television did.

His specialty is a very particular kind of person: absolutely confident and slightly wrong. The pastor, the bureaucrat, the man explaining something he has misunderstood, delivered in an accent that is technically from nowhere. He rarely plays the joke. He plays someone who does not know they are in one, which is why his cameos survive films that do not deserve them.

Live-action cinema has mostly used him in two-minute doses, and animation has used him best. Elliot Birch in Big Mouth is the most sustained comic creation available here, a father whose relentless supportive positivity becomes its own form of horror. Uncle Fester in Wednesday gave him his largest live-action audience, and the Nintendo and Lego pictures keep him in children's ears. The shape of the career is unusual: an enormous number of appearances, very few leads, and a consistent sense that he is amusing himself first and checking with the audience afterwards.