page_title: George Robey
section_title: Music hall characterisations
hierarchical_section_title: George Robey / Biography / Early life / Music hall characterisations
caption_attribution_description: English: The English Music hall comedian George Robey in character as The Prime Minister of Mirth. Photo taken by an unknown, freelanced photographer on behalf of the Rotary Photo Company.
context_page_description: Sir George Edward Wade, CBE, known professionally as George Robey, was an English comedian, singer and actor in musical theatre, who became known as one of the greatest music hall performers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a comedian, he mixed everyday situations and observations with comic absurdity. Apart from his music hall acts, he was a popular Christmas pantomime performer in the English provinces, where he excelled in the dame roles. He scored notable successes in musical revues during and after the First World War, particularly with the song "If You Were the Only Girl", which he performed with Violet Loraine in the revue The Bing Boys Are Here. One of his best-known original characters in his six-decade long career was the Prime Minister of Mirth.
  Born in London, Robey came from a middle-class family. After schooling in England and Germany, and a series of office jobs, he made his debut on the London stage, at the age of 21, as the straight man to a comic hypnotist. Robey soon developed his own act and appeared at the Oxford Music Hall in 1890, where he earned favourable notices singing "The Simple Pimple" and "He'll Get It Where He's Gone to Now".
context_section_description: During the 1890s Robey created a number of music hall characters centred on everyday life. Among them were "The Chinese Laundryman" and "Clarence, the Last of the Dandies". As Clarence, Robey dressed in a top hat and frock coat and carried a malacca cane, the garb of a stereotypical Victorian gentleman. For his drag pieces, the comedian established "The Lady Dresser", a female tailor who was desperate to out-dress her high class customers, and "Daisy Dillwater, the District Nurse" who arrived on stage with a bicycle to share light-hearted scandal and gossip with the audience before hurriedly cycling off.
  With Robey's popularity came an eagerness to differentiate himself from his music hall rivals, and so he devised a signature costume when appearing as himself: an oversized black coat fastened from the neck down with large, wooden buttons; black, unkempt, baggy trousers and a partially bald wig with black, whispery strands of unbrushed, dirty-looking hair that poked below a large, dishevelled top-hat. He applied thick white face paint and exaggerated the redness on his cheeks and nose with bright red make-up; his eye line and eyebrows were also enhanced with thick, black greasepaint. He held a short, misshaped, wooden walking stick, which was curved at the top. Robey later used the costume for his character, The Prime Minister of Mirth. The outfit helped Robey become instantly recognisable on the London music hall circuit. He next made a start at building his repertoire and bought the rights to comic songs and monologues by several well-established music hall writers, including Sax Rohmer and Bennett Scott. For his routines, Robey developed a characteristic delivery described by Cotes as "a kind of machine-gun staccato rattle through each polysyllabic line, ending abruptly, and holding the pause while he fixed his audience with his basilisk stare."
caption: "The Prime Minister of Mirth", whose costume Robey had based on an earlier design
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