Parodies go wrong so often on stage that there are times (say, during the Fringe Festival) when they seem to be a special form of torture. And then once in a great while, a parody goes so gloriously right that you remember what a heady, elemental pleasure great satire can be.

“Pig Farm,” the Roundabout’s gleefully coarse new comedy from writer Greg Kotis and director John Rando (the team behind “Urinetown”), merrily sends up everything in its farmhouse kitchen set: plain folks and the law, the stud farmhand and the pudgy pig farmer, the hard-bitten farmer’s wife and the overzealous EPA man.Yet even as it flogs its cliches, “Pig Farm” cheerfully acknowledges our hard-wired affection for them. How we love our G-men and our noble farmers, our reformed juvenile delinquents and our liberated gals!

And how we especially love them here, as portrayed by the four extraordinarily facile, nuanced actors who give “Pig Farm” its madcap energy. Tom (John Ellison Conlee), a pig farmer facing a dreaded visit from the EPA, has a John Goodman-like brusqueness but a tender heart; dumping fecal sludge in the river makes him feel mighty low.His irascible wife, Tina (Tony winner Katie Finneran, in a brilliant performance), fumes as she folds the laundry. Tom promised her a baby, and after years of helping him birth hogs, she’s determined to collect. Meanwhile the surly young farmhand Tim (Logan Marshall-Green), sprung from “juvie hall” on a work-release program to help Tom, eyes Tina hungrily. It’s Tim whose “pig count” has to match the tally of a powerdrunk, slippery G-man, the pistol-packing EPA agent Teddy (Denis O’Hare, a Tony winner for “Take Me Out”).

Mr. Kotis has constructed a whirligig plot that recalls W.C. Fields or early Chaplin in its love of slapstick and escalating lunacy. Mr. Rando directs with split-second timing; you’re not aware of the bits as bits, it’s all just one long-running, delirious flow.And the gags can be wonderfully irrational and absurd. Cranky Tina shoving a glass of whisky down the long kitchen table to Tim is inexplicably hilarious; so is the tetchyTeddy inexpertly slamming a chair against the table.

If Mr. Kotis’s plot and physical gags are indebted to vaudeville, his punchy, nonstop dialogue is a dizzying amalgam of old and new. The rat-a-tat rhythms of Abbott and Costello are heard in the characters’ quick back-and-forth banter. And there’s a Three Stooges-like musicality here: high- and low-pitched voices are part of the fun, and their rising and falling can be as funny as the words. (In one particularly brilliant scene, Tom and “the feed-meal man” bicker outside the kitchen window; you can’t see them or make out their muddled words. But the intonations of their voices are laughout-loud funny, like that old Charlie Brown schoolteacher gag.) Here is where Mr. Rando’s background in musicals pays enormous dividends. With Mr. Rando’s brilliant ear for the music of comedy – its notes, rhythms, and timing – the audience is in very good hands.

As much as “Pig Farm” taps into American comic traditions of the past, it also borrows heavily from contemporary ones. “Pig Farm” could not have existed without the decades of saccharine television that have flooded today’s collective unconscious with stock pop cliches. In one inspired sequence, after the virile, mud-splashed Tim seduces the lovelorn Tina on the kitchen table, they cycle at warpspeed through every last televisionmovie cliche about affairs. “You made me into a man last night, Tina,” he says. “I want you to come with me.” “Can’t make a life with a fugitive, Tim,” Tina says briskly. “Maybe,” he intones, “you can’t make a life without one.”

Later, when the showdown with the G-man deteriorates into a boilerplate television shootout, Mr. Kotis moves silkily among the standard options. Someone gets framed, the sirens wail, and a man who must be dead suddenly sits bolt upright.Yet the economical Mr. Kotis never allows the shtick to gum up the action. One of the delicious ironies of “Pig Farm” is that it proceeds earnestly, like a drama.

It’s interesting that “Pig Farm” has none of the snobbery you might expect from a play about the heartland pitched to an urban sensibility. Mr. Kotis’s haggard farm folk, who hate the federal government with a passion, may fit neatly into stereotyped slots. But not for one minute are they meant to be real people. These are the outrageous, largerthan-life characters of a wild ride through a wry fictional America, where the American dream is to have 15,000 squealing pigs out back, rolling around in their own excrement.

This is almost Pinter territory, but it has a distinctly American freshness all its own. At a time when so much America-themed theater is polemical or topical, it is refreshing to see a production go to that much-neglected spring of American absurdism. With the whip-smart “Pig Farm,” Mr. Kotis and Mr. Rando (and their sublime cast) are making full use of the unique capabilities of theater – the special weight it lends to the surreal, the sound of belly laughs in the house, and the crackle of perfectly-timed live comic performance.

Until September 3 (111 W. 46th Street, at Sixth Avenue, 212-719-1300).