To be honest, I don’t even really like Cheers. But I do like Rhea Perlman. The disappointing thing to me about the success of Danny DeVito, who I’m not saying I dislike, is that I feel as though she ought to be as successful. She’s been working steadily for forty years now, and she’s done good work. It’s just that he gets more attention than she does. So all I’m going to say about him for the rest of this piece is that she’s two inches taller than he is.

Yeah, okay, so we think of her as Carla Tortelli from Cheers. I’m not sure everyone I know is capable of naming a second role of hers, though I confess that my favourite of her roles is a cameo where her character is merely “Mrs. D.” Steady work isn’t necessarily flashy, and it’s got to be disheartening to have one of your first movie credits be for “Little Jewish Prostitute.” The problem, I think, is that she’s five feet tall and average-looking, and the industry just doesn’t know what to do with someone like that.

And, okay, I don’t even know how much she can really act, because I’ve never really seen her have to act. I’ve seen her sling zingers, going back and forth with Ted Danson or Shelly Long or whoever, but most of the other things I’ve seen her in aren’t much deeper—I liked The Sessions, but upon seeing her credit as “Mikvah Lady”on IMDb, my thought was, “Oh, yeah, she was in that, wasn’t she?” She played herself on an episode of Matlock once?

One of the reasons I don’t like the fuss people make over films of the ’70s is that there were more roles for guys who look like Dustin Hoffman or whoever, but there were not more roles for women who look like Rhea Perlman. She’s good at being the wacky sidekick, but for women who look like her, that’s pretty much the space in pop culture we have available for them. There’s no reason that more characters can’t be played by Rhea Perlman, but I suspect she never gets offers. I don’t know if she can act, but that’s because no one has really given me an opportunity to see what she’s capable of.

I don’t know why I like Rhea Perlman as much as I do. I was looking over some of the quotes for the character of Carla on the IMDb character page, and I was horrified by much of what I found. Casual slut-shaming—which is super, super hypocritical given the character’s own history. Body shaming, of course. (I mind less when she insults stupid people for being stupid, I’ll admit.) She’s really a very unpleasant character, and the other notable Rhea Perlman role I can think of—Matilda Wormwood’s mother—is not, of course, any better. When you want someone short and surly, Rhea Perlman seems to be a standard choice. She’s still hilarious in her cameo in 10 Items or Less.