Major de Coverley

Major de Coverley is a towering, eyepatched senior officer whose actual duties nobody can quite name — he seems mainly to travel ahead of the advancing army, secure apartments for the officers, and pitch horseshoes with terrifying concentration. He barely speaks. The men regard him with something close to superstitious dread, and he does nothing to discourage it.

Laurie plays him almost entirely through silence and stillness, which makes him funnier and more unsettling than any amount of dialogue could. The joke is that no one, including the audience, can tell if he's a figure of absurd bureaucratic menace or genuinely dangerous — and Laurie never tips the balance, which is exactly why he lingers in memory.