Schwank

   The etymological source of this form of situation comedy is the Middle High German swanc, meaning a prank or comic escapade; it could have meant the recitation of said prank, but by the beginning of the 19th century, August von Kotzebue was using Schwank to mean a comic play predicated on complications arising from a compounding series of situations. It developed through the 19th century as a situation comedy first and foremost, with discoveries, reversals, and mistaken identities as the basic materials of its dramatic content. The exposition is totally mechanical, much as it is in French farce, a means to set up the situation in which the comic action may develop. Characters in the Schwank have relationships with each other that go only deep enough to further the comic situation. They usually have no previous conflicts with one another, and they reveal their feelings or motivations only to the point of creating additional complications that will enable further comic situations to develop. The Schwank is most often a play with at least three acts and rarely any music. Characters do not "try" to get laughs, and actors must almost always play their lines straight. The customary situations in which characters involuntarily find themselves have been skill-fully created to evoke pleasant, but not forceful laughter within an audience.

   The Schwank enjoyed its apex of popularity between 1880 and 1930, when thousands of them were premiered—usually in Berlin— and subsequently in repertoires throughout the German-speaking world. Some of the most popular plays in the history of German theater have been Schwanke, most notable and successful among them Franz von Schönthan's Der Raub der Sabinerinnen (The Rape of the Sabine Women), Carl Laufs and Wilhelm Jacoby's Pension Schüller (The Schöller Boardinghouse), and Franz Arnold and Ernst Bach's Die spanische Fliege (The Spanish Fly).