Funny Honeys

Ben Stiller
Birthday: November 30, 1965

The breaks: With famed funnyman Jerry Stiller and classic comic Anne Meara as parents, Ben had a leg up with genetics ("If they were like, plumbers, who knows what I would be doing?") -- but he still had to earn his own star. He made his big-screen debut in Steven Spielberg's drama Empire of the Sun and spent a year on Saturday Night Live. Fits and starts followed: MTV's The Ben Stiller Show built a cult following but never caught on. And, adding salt to the wound, the show won an Emmy just after it was canceled. His big-screen directorial debut, Reality Bites, hit with Generation X -- if not with the critics; his highly hyped directorial follow-up, The Cable Guy, bombed across the board. But Ben rebounded, juggling acting, producing and directing in a range of genres. His startling turn as drug-addicted screenwriter Jerry Stahl in the biopic Permanent Midnight (1998) proved Ben's chops. And the one-two box office punch from blockbusters There's Something about Mary and Meet the Parents earned Stiller Hollywood high-fives. Now he's handpicking his projects -- like the big-screen remake of Starsky & Hutch.

Funniest moment: The "hair gel" hand-off in There's Something About Mary.

Most romantic moment: Greg Focker's hard-won proposal in Meet the Parents.

Sidekick: Married to actress Christine Taylor (his costar in Zoolander) since 2000, the two have a daughter, Ella Olivia, born in April 2002.

Up next: The Meet the Parents sequel, Meet the Fockers, and Dodgeball the "underdog" comedy about a ragtag team in a Las Vegas tournament, costarring Vince Vaughan.

Next: Jimmy Fallon