Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Bartleigh

George is the eternally cheerful subaltern in the trenches, bursting with schoolboy enthusiasm for the glory of war. He views the whole ghastly business as a jolly wheeze, an extension of rugby and rah-rah patriotism, utterly untouched by irony or dread. Loyal, dim, and endlessly game, he bounds through each scheme Blackadder concocts without ever quite grasping the danger.

Laurie plays George with a puppyish, wide-eyed sincerity that makes his patriotic bluster funnier than mere stupidity would allow — you believe he really means it. That sincerity is the joke's engine: the comedy of his blind enthusiasm sits beside the real horror of the setting, and Laurie never lets you see the seams between them.