Frederick John Westcott (26 March 1865 – 17 September 1941), best known by his stage name Fred Karno, was an English theatre impresario of the British music hall.

"[5] Among the music hall comedians who worked for him were Charlie Chaplin and his understudy, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who later adopted the name of Stan Laurel.

[12] Karno spent his last years in southwest England in the village of Lilliput, Dorset, as a part-owner of an off-licence, and died there in 1941 from diabetes, aged 75.

[1][9] "Chaplin remained the great observer of the absurdity of life's endless struggles, an actor trained with Karno's "Speechless Comedians" to express each thought and attitude in mime."

These comedians were the backbone of British variety throughout the first half of the 20th century, and many were recruited by fledgling studios in Hollywood as the cream of physical slapstick comedy.

[4] Karno was also an innovator: he choreographed mime shows for his own troupe, Karno's Komics, and brought slapstick circus comedy to the music hall which included his 1904 sketch Mumming Birds, featuring a number of new innovations including the pie in the face gag; its success saw it become the longest-running sketch the music halls produced.

[15] Calling Karno "a master of publicity", Samantha Ellis in The Guardian writes that "one of his favourite tricks was to drive a red Rolls-Royce scattering flyers as he went".

The American writer Trav S.D., author of No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, has proclaimed Crump's biography as "definitive, full of original primary research and then digested and turned into perceptive and entertaining prose", adding "there is a tendency to restrict Karno mentally to the British music hall in which he was so central, and to associate him almost entirely with his two best known creative progeny (Chaplin and Laurel).

Given the minor fact that between them Chaplin and Laurel largely wrote the rules for screen comedy, it might be well to think of Karno as a Socrates to their Aristotle and Xenophon.

Crump's strongly worded formulation is the one we should all now go by, calling Karno "the most significant exponent of sketch comedy and physical slapstick the stage has ever seen".

[18] On 30 September 2012, the Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America unveiled a commemorative blue plaque to Karno at his former studios at 38 Southwell Road, Camberwell, in south London.