October 27, 1939

1939John Cleese, English actor, comedian, screenwriter and producer^[†]

John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).

1939Suzy Covey, American scholar and academic (died 2007)^[†]

Suzy Covey (Shaw) was an American comics scholar, whose work examined intersections of comics, technology, and sound, including Internet studies and studies of the Comic Book Markup Language. In honor of her work with its comic collections, the Smathers Libraries renamed them the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in Special Collections in 2007.