Fred Evans (comedian)

Fred Evans (1889 – 1951) was a British music hall and silent film comedian, who became famous around the time of the First World War for portraying his character Pimple in more than 200 short movies. He was described as "second only in popularity to Chaplin in Britain at the height of his career," and as displaying "a proto-Pythonesque humour of the absurd." Critic Barry Anthony wrote that "in many ways the topical skits of Pimple have more in common with The Crazy Gang, Benny Hill, the Goons, Monty Python or topical sketch shows like French and Saunders and The Fast Show than with the classic Hollywood silent comedies."

Evans was born in London into a family of music hall and circus performers. His grandfather, also named Fred Evans, was a popular clown who staged harlequinades; his uncle Will Evans was a leading music hall comedian; and his parents were members of several touring musical troupes. He was a childhood friend of Charlie Chaplin, and as a child performed with his brother Joe as part of his parents' pantomime act, the Florador Quartet. Fred and Joe then worked together and individually in music hall, and for Sanger's Circus, before joining filmmakers Cricks and Martin in 1910. Evans' early screen appearances were as Charley Smiler, a disaster-prone 'dude' character dressed in frock coat, waistcoat and spats.

In 1912, Fred and Joe Evans began working at the Ec-Ko studios in Teddington, and set up their own production company, Folly Films. Unable to use the Charley Smiler character because of legal threats from Cricks and Martin, Evans devised a new character, Pimple, an accident-prone clown with a tight jacket, baggy pants, big boots, cricket cap, and lank strands of hair around a central parting. The films were scripted by Joe Evans. Early films were often chases; in Pimple and the Snake (1912), Pimple tries to retrieve a snake that has escaped from the zoo, but instead chases a lady's feather boa, causing chaos. By 1913, the comedies were increasingly spoofs of popular films, plays and novels. For example, a series of Lieutenant Pimple films poked fun at the screen exploits of the swashbuckling Lieutenant Daring, hero of more serious melodramas.Pimple's Battle of Waterloo (1913) was a merciless parody of the recent epic film The Battle of Waterloo, which had been characterised by location filming and (for the period) lavish production values. Pimple's version made a virtue of its low-budget filming in the backyard of their premises at Eel Pie Island to ridicule the earlier production. In Pimple in The Whip (1917), another parody, the Evans brothers used pantomime horses and a man wearing a horse head and carrying a stick in each hand to represent the front legs, to re-enact the original movie's thrilling race scenes. The films also made use of jokey and punning intertitles.

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