Blackadder is a British television comedy from the 1980s. There were four main series, and each one is set in a different stretch of British history. Rowan Atkinson plays Edmund Blackadder in every series; Tony Robinson plays his servant Baldrick. The joke of the whole show is a family line that keeps coming back: each Blackadder is a descendant of the last one, but his place in society gets worse. In the first series he is a medieval prince. Later he is a courtier under Queen Elizabeth, then a butler to a foolish prince, and in the last series a captain in the First World War. As the setting gets darker, Blackadder himself gets sharper, drier, and more bitter, while Baldrick stays loyal and comes up with terrible “cunning plans.” Though actually, people in Britain often say “Blackadder” the way they say a famous book title: they mean the whole world of the show, not only the man’s name. It is a proper name, so it stays capitalised. You do not use it as a common word for a cynical person, even if the character feels that way.