Leslie Nielsen made us laugh.

For any other performer, that’s enough to rate in our book. But Nielsen, who died Sunday, wasn’t any other performer.

Here are five more reasons we loved him:

1. He had two, no, three careers: By our count, Nielsen was a working actor (with a reported 1,500 TV credits); a solid, sturdy, arguably square leading man (the captain of the original Poseidon Adventure, no less); a short-lived TV star on the short-lived Police Squad!; and, finally, the king of the spoof movie. Better make that four careers.