After years of being typecast for her babe-alicious beauty alone, Jaime Pressly is finally earning critical kudos for the inspired comedic timing she displays as Joy, the title character’s scheming ex-wife on NBC’s “My Name Is Earl.”
“Yeah, but it’s about time, right?” she responds, sounding like her plain-talking alter ego. “I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and it’s really just so nice to finally get noticed for something other than [my physical attri-butes].”
Pressly credits the men in her family for teaching her how to make people laugh.
“The Pressly men couldn’t be any funnier,” she says. “My dad, brother and uncle, all of them can tell you a great dirty joke at any moment. If they don’t have one, they’ll make one up on the spot.”
Her mother, a highly regarded dance instructor and choreographer who also staged local pageants, gave Pressly her early exposure to the stage, something she put to good use in an “Earl” episode that found Joy competing for a pageant crown.
“I was never in one of those, but I was around a lot of them, and I saw how the girls and their mothers are,” Pressly says. “It was great to make fun of that, because I was just never a fan of all that.”
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Born: July 30, 1977, in Kinston, N.C.
Family ties: Father is an auto salesman; mother is a dance instructor and choreographer; one brother.
Early bloomer: She became legally emancipated from her parents at age 15 (with their blessing) so she could accept a modeling assignment in Japan.
