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But just when you think you're out, they pull you back in: Playboy still runs pictures of bare-breasted Jenny blowing soap bubbles (see the September issue). "They take 70,000 photos at your layout shoot so they can rerun them forever," she explains.

In any case, the Playmate gig was her ticket to California, where she attended a couple of acting classes and made the usual rounds of auditions. She landed a few tiny parts--like a nurse in one scene in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead--but Hollywood seemed mostly unimpressed. She was even turned down for Mallrats. "I've heard she says that we laughed at her while she was leaving the audition, but that's not true," cracks Mallrats director Kevin Smith. "We waited till she was way out in the parking lot."

The big break came in 1995 with MTV's Singled Out, a dopey Dating Game update in which horny college dudes humiliated themselves trying to impress sexy college girls. Totally forgettable TV--except for the ballsy blond hostess who barked orders ("No touching Jenny!") and beat the crap out of the grabby frat kids who swarmed around her every week, proving she could be just as rowdy and obnoxious as the guys. "Hey," McCarthy says, "I had three minutes of camera time on Singled Out. When that red light went on--boom!--I was going to do whatever it took to get noticed."

Oh, she got noticed. Singled Out became MTV's best-rated show, thanks entirely to McCarthy's energizing effect on its young male audience. (It bombed after she left last year, despite the best efforts of replacement Playmate Carmen Electra.) As a reward, MTV gave her The Jenny McCarthy Show, a six-episode, half-hour comedy-variety series in which she was allowed to do pretty much whatever she wanted. And what she wanted, it turned out, was to hock a massive loogie at her own sex-kitten image.

"I made a point of going really gross," she says. "Like the Helga skit, where I have really long armpit hair? I wanted to show that I didn't take myself that seriously."

The show wasn't everyone's cup of tea--her Vomit Eating sketch, for instance, didn't exactly sweep the Emmys--but it did take Jenny to a place no Playmate had been before. Pushing the envelope of bathroom humor to bold new heights, sneering at the shallowness of beach-bunny aesthetics (while at the same time personifying its Baywatch ideal), McCarthy reinvented herself as a sort of neo-feminist cult heroine: the postmodern bimbo.

Okay, that's laying it on a bit thick, but the media hype last year was out of control. Jenny was being heralded as the new Lucy, a Gen-X Goldie Hawn, a Jim Carrey with boobs. Inevitably, word filtered up to the big shots in Hollywood's power suites. Lunches were taken, deals cut.

Paramount Studio's TV division, which produces Frasier, among other shows, already had a development arrangement with MTV (both companies are owned by Viacom), so it had first crack at exploring Jenny's sitcom potential. After a guest spot on Paramount's Wings, in which McCarthy performed unembarrassingly as an over-the-top temp who speaks in annoying baby talk, the studio commissioned two of the show's writers, Reisman and Gewirtz, to confer with McCarthy and cook up a Jenny concept. "I wanted to play the other side of me," says McCarthy. "The side that can sit down and have a normal conversation. Still my personality, but not, you know, throwing up on camera."


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