Funny female comedians

The woman who will always be remembered as the crazy, accident-prone, lovable Lucy Ricardo was born Lucille Desiree Ball on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York, the daughter of Desiree Evelyn "DeDe" (Hunt) and Henry Durrell "Had" Ball. Her father died before she was four, and her mother worked several jobs, so she and her younger brother were raised by their grandparents. Always willing to take responsibility for her brother and young cousins, she was a restless teenager who yearned to "make some noise". She entered a dramatic school in New York City, but while her classmate Bette Davis received all the raves, she was sent home; "too shy". She found some work modeling for Hattie Carnegie's and, in 1933, she was chosen to be a "Goldwyn Girl" and appear in the film Roman Scandals (1933).

She was put under contract to RKO Radio Pictures and several small roles, including one in Top Hat (1935), followed. Eventually, she received starring roles in B-pictures and, occasionally, a good role in an A-picture, like in Stage Door (1937) or The Big Street (1942). While filming Too Many Girls (1940), she met and fell madly in love with a young Cuban actor-musician named Desi Arnaz. Despite different personalities, lifestyles, religions and ages (he was six years younger), he fell hard, too, and after a passionate romance, they eloped and were married in November 1940. Lucy soon switched to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she got better roles in films such as Du Barry Was a Lady (1943); Best Foot Forward (1943) and the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle Without Love (1945). In 1948, she took a starring role in the radio comedy "My Favorite Husband", in which she played the scatterbrained wife of a Midwestern banker. In 1950, CBS came knocking with the offer of turning it into a television series. After convincing the network brass to let Desi play her husband and to sign over the rights to and creative control over the series to them, work began on the most popular and universally beloved sitcom of all time.

With I Love Lucy (1951), she and Desi promoted the 3-camera technique now the standard in filming sitcoms using 35mm film (the earliest known example of the 3-camera technique is the first Russian feature film, "Defence of Sevastopol" in 1911). Desi syndicated I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball was the first woman to own her own studio as the head of Desilu Productions.

Lucille Ball died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, age 77, of an acute aortic aneurysm on April 26, 1989 in Los Angeles, CA.

Wanda Sykes has been called one of the funniest stand-up comics by her peers and ranks among Entertainment Weekly's 25 Funniest People in America. Her smart-witted stand-up has sent her career in many different areas.

She was previously seen in Comedy Central's Wanda Does It (2004), where she tried various non-showbiz jobs. Her first book, "Yeah I Said It," published by Simon and Schuster, hit bookstores in September 2004, which is a hilarious collection of essays touching on life, family, and current events.

In 2003, she was seen on Fox's Wanda at Large (2003), in which she wrote, produced, and starred. She also has a one-hour Comedy Central special called Wanda Sykes: Tongue Untied (2003). In addition, she can be seen on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) or heard on Comedy Central's Crank Yankers (2002) as the voice of Gladys Murphy.

Wanda was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and raised in Maryland, the daughter of Marion Louise (Peoples), a banker, and Harry Ellsworth Sykes, a US Army colonel. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Hampton University. Her stand-up career began at a Coors Light Super talent Showcase in Washington, DC, where she performed for the first time in front of a live audience.

She spent 5 years as part of the HBO's critically acclaimed The Chris Rock Show (1997). As a performer and writer on the show, she was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards and in 1999 won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music, or Comedy Special. In 2001, she won the American Comedy Award for Outstanding Female Stand-Up Comic. She won a second Emmy in 2002 for her work on Inside the NFL (1977). In 2003, Wanda earned a Comedy Central Commie Award for Funniest TV Actress. Other writing credits include the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards (1999), The MTV Movie Awards, The 74th Annual Academy Awards (2002), The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show (1997), and Wanda at Large (2003).

She also appeared in the feature films Pootie Tang (2001), Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000), Down to Earth (2001), and Monster-in-Law (2005).

Betty White was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to Christine Tess (Cachikis), a homemaker, and Horace Logan White, a lighting company executive for the Crouse-Hinds Electric Company. She was of Danish, Greek, English, and Welsh descent.

Although she was best known as the devious Sue Ann Nivens on the classic sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) and the ditzy Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls (1985), Betty White had been in television for a long, long time before those two shows, having had her own series, Life with Elizabeth (1952) in 1952.

She was married three times, lastly for eighteen years, until widowed, to TV game-show host Allen Ludden.

She was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and she was known for her tireless efforts on behalf of animals.

Betty White died on 31 December 2021, at the age of 99.

Alex Borstein is a Chicago-born American actress, known for her work on the animated sitcom Family Guy (1999), Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story (2005), Bad Santa (2003), and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017). Borstein became a MADtv cast member in 1997, during the sketch comedy show's third season. The following year, Seth MacFarlane cast her as the voice of Lois Griffin in Family Guy, which debuted on Fox in 1999. In 2013, due to her work on Family Guy, Borstein was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance and, in 2018, Borstein won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her portrayal of Susie Myerson on the period dramedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Tracey Ullman (born Trace Ullman) is a multiple award-winning television, stage and film actress who performs as a comedian, singer, dancer, as well as works as a screenwriter, producer, director, author, and businesswoman. She holds dual British and American citizenship.

Ullman's early appearances were on British television sketch comedy shows A Kick Up the Eighties (with Rik Mayall and Miriam Margolyes) and Three of a Kind (with Lenny Henry and David Copperfield). After a brief singing career, she appeared as Candice Valentine in Girls on Top with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.

She emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States where she starred in her own network television comedy series, The Tracey Ullman Show, from 1987 until 1990. She later produced programmes for HBO, including Tracey Takes On... (1996-99), for which she garnered numerous awards. Ullman's sketch comedy series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union, ran from 2008 to 2010 on Showtime. She has also appeared in several feature films. Ullman was the first British woman to be offered her own television sketch show in the United States, and in 2016 starred in her own BBC sketch comedy show Tracey Ullman's Show, her first project for the broadcaster in over thirty years.

Paula Poundstone was born on 29 December 1959 in Huntsville, Alabama, USA. She is an actress and writer, known for Home Movies (1999), Inside Out (2015) and Hyperspace (1984).

The legendary actress set a record when at age 82, she appeared on Dancing with the Stars (2005). Cloris Leachman was born on April 30, 1926 in Des Moines, Iowa to Berkeley Claiborne "Buck" Leachman and the former Cloris Wallace. Her father's family owned a lumber company, Leachman Lumber Co. She was of Czech (from her maternal grandmother) and English descent. After graduating from high school, Leachman attended Illinois State University and Northwestern University, where she majored in drama. After winning the title of Miss Chicago 1946 (as part of the Miss America pageant), she acted with the Des Moines Playhouse before moving to New York.

Leachman made her credited debut in 1948 in an episode of The Ford Theatre Hour (1948) and appeared in many television anthologies and series before becoming a regular on The Bob & Ray Show (1951) in 1952. Her movie debut was memorable, playing the doomed blonde femme fatale Christina Bailey in Robert Aldrich's classic noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Other than a role in Rod Serling's movie The Rack (1956) in support of Paul Newman, Leachman remained a television actress throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, appearing in only two movies during the latter decade, The Chapman Report (1962) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Though she would win an Oscar for Peter Bogdanovich's adaptation of Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show (1971) and appear in three Mel Brooks movies, it was in television that her career remained and her fame was assured in the 1970s and into the second decade of the new millennium.

Leachman was nominated five times for an Emmy Award playing Phyllis Lindstrom, Mary Tyler Moore's landlady and self-described best friend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) and on the spin-off series Phyllis (1975). She won twice as Best Supporting Actress in a comedy for her "Mary Tyler Moore" gig and won a Golden Globe Award as a leading performer in comedy for "Phyllis", but her first Emmy Award came in the category Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in 1973 for the television movie A Brand New Life (1973). She also won two Emmy Awards as a supporting player for Malcolm in the Middle (2000).

She was married to director-producer George Englund from 1953 to 1979. They had five children together. Cloris Leachman died of natural causes on January 27, 2021 in Encinitas, California.