On the episode, Day jokes about revealing the character’s name to all of the podcast listeners. While that idea is shot down, they do dig into the origins of the character, who existed all the way back in the original home movie pilot. Her name was sort of an “homage to where we were at that time,” according to McElhenney, and they haven’t decided if it’s concrete that the name has stayed the same, but there’s an even more solid reason for not revealing it: there’s no real point of reference in the show, and it would be a big bunch of nothing. As McElhenney explains:
“But it’s so much funnier, of course, that you don’t know. And I remember a similar thing happening in the writers room. We realized we needed to name Mac, season whatever it was. And I think I just said, oh, let’s just make him Jimmy McDonald. And then I remember you [Day] coming into the writers room and being like, ‘What’s his name? Jimmy McDonald?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I dunno. We just gotta come up with the name.’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, but we’ve done it for so long. We haven’t revealed it. It should be a big reveal.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I just, let’s just keep it simple.’ And then we started pitching on it and you were like, ‘No, it’s definitely Ronald.’ […] I knew that we would need something equally as profound as that for the Waitress. Otherwise, if we just called her [bleep], no one would, it just wouldn’t have any resonance.”
McElhenney absolutely has a point, because people are going to want her name to be funny, otherwise there’s no reason to share it at all.