George Grossmith was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer whose career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, approximately 600 songs and piano pieces, and three books, as well as both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines.

Grossmith is best remembered for two aspects of his career. First, he created a series of nine memorable characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance (1880), and Ko-Ko in The Mikado (1885–87). Second, he wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel The Diary of a Nobody.

Grossmith was also famous for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs. He became the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s, and some of his comic songs, such as "See Me Dance the Polka", endure to this day. Grossmith continued to perform into the first decade of the 20th century. His son, George Grossmith Jr., became an actor, playwright, and producer of Edwardian musical comedies, while another son, Lawrence, was an actor.