Sassy TV Waitresses of the '70s, Part 1

Shirley Hemphill
July 1, 1947 - Dec 10, 1999

I want to go out on a limb here and say that I never found What's Happening!! to be a classic of American television. I mean, I saw every episode multiple times, but that doesn't mean they were good. It just meant that it was on between Batman and Gilligan's Island in the afternoons and I had no life. It was a terrible show. I can see why this is controversial, but an argument can be made that there is a valid reason the cast has never appeared on Inside the Actor's Studio.

Much of the show's heat came from the interplay between fat teenager Rerun (Fred Berry) and fat waitress Shirley (Shirley Hemphill). These were a series of fat jokes they exchanged, but you could feel the raw sexual tension between them. You just knew there was something under the surface. There was fire in their eyes. When those cameras went off, it was wall-to-wall naked brown flesh...and lots of it.

I'm also going to go further out on the same limb and say that Shirley Hemphill never turned me on. She was all right, but I never found her joke delivery to my liking. Even after What's Happening!! ended after three seasons and she'd gotten her own short lived show (One in a Million) she didn't seem to grow. She spent the rest of her life playing essentially the same character (and literally played the same character in the 1985-88 syndicated sitcom What's Happening Now!!), but she had her moment, and she made a big enough impression that I'm writing these words about her a decade after her death.

On her TV show the Monday after Shirley Hemphill died, Rosie O'Donnell paid tribute to her by mentioning that she helped Rosie land her first paying gig in comedy. A sweet tribute, but Rosie had the hottest show on daytime TV at the time and never had her on when she was alive. She was also mentioned in the credits of Scary Movie, wherein her good friends the Wayans brothers dedicated the film to her. And misspelled her name.

If you really want to know how big of an impression she made on me, I'll grant you this. July 1, 2000 Walter Matthau died. July 1, 2004 Marlon Brando died. As a rule of this blog, I would have been able to write about them. But instead I saw Shirley Hemphill's name listed (July 1 being the date of her birth) and knew that there was no more important person I could write about today.