Jamie Lee Curtis gave Brooklyn-based illustrator Karl Stevens a public shoutout on Instagram this week, tagging his account with the four-word caption “Some like it PEPPERY.”
The line is a direct play on “Some Like It Hot.” The 1959 Billy Wilder comedy starred her father, Tony Curtis, opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. That film is widely regarded as one of the great Hollywood comedies. The American Film Institute ranked it the funniest American film ever made. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Screenplay.
Filming was famously fraught. Monroe’s behavior tested the patience of everyone on set, including Tony Curtis. He later described working with her in unflattering terms. The remark followed him in interviews for years. Despite all that, the finished film was a triumph, and it remains central to Tony Curtis’s legacy.
Karl Stevens is an illustrator and cartoonist based in Brooklyn. His editorial work appears regularly in The New Yorker. His contributions there include cartoons and illustrations known for a dry, precise wit. The post doesn’t make their personal connection clear. She didn’t explain the tag. But “peppery” suits his work as a descriptor, implying something with edge rather than sweetness.
The celebrity-to-artist shoutout is a small but meaningful corner of social media. A tag from someone with Curtis’s platform can introduce a working illustrator to a much wider audience. That kind of visibility is hard to buy.
For Curtis, invoking her father’s filmography even in jest carries some weight. She’s spoken at length in interviews about her father’s complex legacy and her complicated feelings about his memory. Tony Curtis died in 2010. He was 85. Curtis has addressed those feelings over the years with unusual candor for someone at her level of public life.
She turned 67 last November. Her screen career runs more than four decades. She’s played Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise since 1978. The role made her a genre icon early in her career. She returned to the character most recently in Halloween Ends in 2022.
Everything Everywhere All at Once opened a different chapter. She took a supporting role in the 2022 film, and it became the most celebrated work of her career. The film won Best Picture at the 95th Academy Awards in March 2023. Curtis won Best Supporting Actress, her first Oscar after more than four decades in film.
She’s also written children’s books, and she’s been consistently public about her recovery from addiction, returning to the subject in interviews with directness rather than deflection.
Stevens hasn’t commented on the tag publicly. Curtis didn’t add context beyond the caption. The post is brief. The pun lands. The effect is simple: a nod to a working illustrator, wrapped in a little family history.
