Harry Shearer

You know Harry Shearer-- you just don't know you know him! He may not have one of the family's voices on The Simpsons, but he is almost everyone else: Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, Smithers, Principal Skinner, Anchorman Kent Brockman, Otto the bus driver, Dr. Hibbert, Reverend Lovejoy, Ranier Wolfcastle, Kang the alien, and more… some 20 characters in all! So of course he is all over the Simpsons movie, which also stars Simpson-ites Julie Kavner and Hank Azaria... plus Albert Brooks!

His most famous movie role is probably Derek Smalls, the bass player in Rob Reiner's Spinal Tap. The same guys who played the heavy-metal band Spinal Tap musicians reunited to play the Folksmen in the folk-music parody A Mighty Wind… and Harry played bass in that band, too. (Christopher Guest also was in both bands!) Now, they are reuniting again as Spinal Tap in the time-travel movie Stonehenge.

Although he doesn't play music in them, Harry does act in two other movies about fake bands, Wayne's World with Mike Myers and One Trick Pony with Jewish songwriter Paul Simon.

Speaking of Christopher Guest, Harry is in his latest movie, and it's about Purim! Called For Your Consideration, it's about actors in a movie about Purim who might be up for Oscars, and how they behave when they hear the news. Eugene Levy is in it, It's also one of our Movies of the Month!

Harry often plays announcers, like in A League of Their Own, Little Giants, and Spaceballs (click to see his Jewish co-stars in these). Maybe this prepared him to do his own show, Le Show, on National Public Radio.

His other movies include Small Soldiers (again with his Spinal Tap bandmates), The Truman Show, and My Best Friend's Wedding. He is in the movie Chicken Little, about the little chicken who believes the sky is falling down. (Silly chicken! Everyone know that with the ozone hole, the sky is floating away!).

But his very first movie role came when he was only 10, in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars… back in 1953! Abbott and Costello, by the way, were one of the earliest comedy teams ever.

On TV, Harry has been in-- aside from The Simpsons, of course-- comedies like Saturday Night Live, Just Shoot Me and Friends.

Your parents will remember another show he was on, Leave it to Beaver, and they might even remember his first big show, The Jack Benny Program, too.

Bonus:

Classic comics Bud Abbott and Jack Benny were Jewish, too!

So were lots of other greats from the black-and-white days of TV and film: Milton Berle, Fanny Brice, Red Buttons, Eddie Cantor, Sid Caesar, Marty Feldman, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, and Henny Youngman.

And don't forget the comedy teams, like The Marx Brothers, The Ritz Borthers, and The Three Stooges.

Jewish comics have been making people laugh for a whole lot longer than Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Sacha Baron Cohen have been around!