Thomas Lennon

Thomas Lennon met Kerri Kenney at a theater camp when he was sixteen, followed her to NYU, and joined a student comedy troupe there. That troupe became MTV's The State, and The State became Reno 911!, where Lennon spent years in very short shorts as Lieutenant Jim Dangle, improvising with a straight face while the department collapsed around him.

The other half of the career is writing, and it is the half that filled multiplexes. With his partner Robert Ben Garant he wrote the Night at the Museum films, The Pacifier, Balls of Fury and Baywatch, broad studio comedies aimed at the widest possible audience, which is roughly the opposite of the deadpan absurdism he performs. The pair also direct: Lennon is credited as director on the 2013 horror comedy Hell Baby, in which he also plays a priest.

As a performer he owns one narrow register completely, and owns it better than anyone: the officious minor official who believes his small jurisdiction matters enormously. It works in a police uniform, in a hotel lobby, in a doctor's coat. He has played a doctor for Christopher Nolan twice, in Memento and The Dark Knight Rises, which is a strange and durable footnote for a man best known for a moustache and a pair of shorts.

The later work leans into affectionate pastiche: the offscreen documentarian in a beauty-pageant mockumentary, the comedy writer Michael O'Donoghue in A Futile and Stupid Gesture, a huckster salesman in the Weird Al film. He is now about as reliable a supporting comic presence as American film has.