Slapstick

La astracanada or astracán (from Astrakhan, a Russian city near the mouth of the Volga River in the Caspian Sea) is a comic theater subgenre that is very popular on Spanish stages during the first third of the 20th century and cultivated by the playwrights Pedro Muñoz Seca and Pedro Pérez Fernández.

The astrakhan was a way out of the farce crisis. Based on a theatricalization of reality, it exploits the use of puns, sentimental falsehoods and crazy situations, to which the characters and the action are subordinated, making use of crude puns, regional typification of speech, proper names that give room for misunderstandings and jokes, abuse of gravel, etc. The most important figure of the astrakhan is the fresco.

In the slapstick all that matters is laughing even at the expense of plot plausibility, and all the other resources of the drama are directed to that function. In its most extreme manifestations, language is even subverted through continuous parody, which is what happens in La venganza de Don Mendo, Muñoz Seca's slapstick in which the historical theater of the Spanish literary modernism and the conventions and themes of Spanish classical theater of the Golden Age.

Other well-known antics by Muñoz Seca are The Executioner of Seville and Los Extremadura touch themselves.