In 2019, I interviewed O’Hara, over cocktails, at the height of a late surge of fame brought on by her Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning role in the surprise-hit sitcom “Schitt’s Creek,” alongside her frequent comedy collaborator Eugene Levy. Unlike her recurring “SCTV” character Chatty Cathy, who prattled incessantly on a talk show called “Enough About Me,” O’Hara was gracious and self-effacing—“I’m talking an awful lot about myself right now,” she said, mid-conversation, as if that wasn’t the point. O’Hara extolled the virtues of improvisational comedy, which she described as the art of “listening to others”—and, in turn, learning how to listen intently to oneself. Like the best sketch comedians, O’Hara was possessed of an impeccable internal tuning fork, and much of her best work came out of an almost musical sense of delivery. Individual words and phrases came out of her mouth with such oddball precision that they became lasting comedic earworms. Think of the stumbling way that Moira Rose, her narcissistic, bewigged matriarch from “Schitt’s Creek,” struggles to pronounce the name “Herb Ertlinger” in a cheesy local commercial for fruit wine; or the way Sheila Albertson, from “Waiting for Guffman,” drunkenly whispers loudly, across a table during an ill-fated double date, “What’s it like to be with a circumcised man?”; or the way Delia Deetz, her deranged sculptor character from “Beetlejuice,” screams, “If you don’t let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will go insane and I will take you with me!”; or the anguished way that Kate McCallister, realizing that she’s abandoned her son during a holiday vacation, sits bolt upright and cries to the heavens, “Kevin!”