Vancouver Film School · CC BY 2.0

A founding writer of Saturday Night Live who came up through National Lampoon at a time when comedy writers' rooms were almost entirely male, earning five Emmy nominations and a win during her run on the show. She went on to create the 1982 sitcom Square Pegs, starring a young Sarah Jessica Parker, deliberately staffing it with women writers on the theory that they understood teenage girls' experience best, and later won a Writers Guild Award for the show's 25th-anniversary special before teaching the next generation of comedy writers at USC and Chapman University.