Julia Louis-Dreyfus

By the end of Seinfeld's last season, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, whose work as Elaine Benes garnered her six Emmy nominations and one victory for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, was widely regarded as one of the two or three funniest women on television.

In the nearly two decades afterward, she has only won six more Emmys, each time in the main role, and she has done it on two very different sorts of series. The first was for CBS's typical three-camera sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine, and the following five—all in a row, setting a record—have been for her outstanding and all-time unforgettable performance as politician Selina Meyers on HBO's single-camera and highly profane Veep.

Few individuals in television history have been as consistently hilarious on so many different programs for as long as she has, and when people look back on her whole career, she may legitimately rank at the top.