Jimmie Walker

One catchphrase has now outlived the show that produced it by decades. Walker played James Evans Jr., J.J., on the CBS comedy Good Times, which ran from 1974 to 1979, and the word he shouted on it, Dyn-o-mite, followed him into Panasonic tape-player advertisements in the mid-1970s and, remarkably, into a public announcement for Medicare between 2021 and 2023.

He was nominated for the Golden Globe in 1975 and again in 1976 for the role, and he did not win either. What Good Times gave him instead was the kind of national recognition that is very hard to convert into a film career, and the record shows the conversion not happening. He starred in Let's Do It Again in 1975 alongside John Amos and in The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened in 1977 with James Earl Jones, and after that the film work becomes a long line of comic cameos: the windshield wiper man in Airplane!, Boisie in The Concorde... Airport '79, parts in Water, Doin' Time, The Guyver, Home Alone 2, a horror spoof, and a shark film in which his character is called Dynamite Stevens.

Stand-up has been the constant. He came out of comedy clubs, he never stopped touring, and he still does. Later screen appearances play on the legacy directly: Gene on Everybody Hates Chris, himself in The Comedian, the 2019 live restaging of Good Times, and a voice part in the 2024 animated revival of the same show.