The British tradition of sitcom is a noble one; Fawlty Towers,Yes Minister, Blackadder and The Office are all familiar favourites. But The Merry Wives of Windsor? According to Christopher Luscombe and his persuasive team at the Globe, Shakespeare’s sunniest comedy is where it all began.

The Globe has taken its fair share of risks recently: Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Henry IV parts I and II — hardly the core repertory for a largely tourist audience. But in many ways The Merry Wives has been the greatest. A play often sidelined for its slapstick comedy and uncomplicated good nature, it remains one of Shakespeare’s least-performed.

Yet, as the author’s sole non-history play with an English setting, and the only one among his own middle-classes, it occupies a uniquely personal niche — one exploited fully in the off-duty, after-hours jollity of this production.

Luxuriantly-bearded, foxily-whiskered and ample-bellied, Christopher Benjamin’s Falstaff is as winsome a rogue as he was back in 2008 — mellowed, if anything, into a part whose generous proportions fit him as snugly as his doublet. Playful as schoolgirls, his “East and West Indies” — Mistresses Page and Ford (Serena Evans and Sarah Woodward) — peddle a delicious line in arch campery, matching the musical commentary of Nigel Hess’s all-but-soundtrack (sudden inspirations are signalled with a tinkling bell, approaching wickedness with tremolo strings) gesture for gesture.

A play whose central conflict involves cross-dressing and concealment in a basket of dirty laundry is ripe fodder indeed for the sitcom treatment. Channelling the glory days of Fawlty Towers, Luscombe’s cast take Shakespeare’s original setting verbatim (complete with Janet Bird’s twee little delight of a knot-garden), superimposing a contemporary brand of humour that sees Andrew Havill’s jealous Ford twitching and convulsing with all the stiff-limbed awkwardness of John Cleese, and Philip Bird’s French doctor Caius contorting his vowels with all the reliable stereotype-comedy of Manuel.

The usually uninteresting trio of young lovers — Anne Page, Slender and Fenton — are subject to he most radical makeover. Slender (an appropriately rangy William Belchambers) has his half-hearted wooing explained by a not-altogether wholesome interest in ladies undergarments, while Anne (Ceri-Lyn Cissone) and Fenton (Gerard McCarthy) become a Disney love-pairing complete with duet and (in McCarthy’s case) a head of lustrous blonde locks that proclaim him unequivocally the Romantic Hero.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is well-suited to the uniquely informal set-up of the Globe. In Luscombe’s treatment the humour gets every bit as direct a response as any TV sitcom. Canned laughter? Who needs it, when you’ve got Shakespeare as your scriptwriter.

The Merry Wives of Windsor continues at the Globe until October 2. Box office: tel. 020 7401 9919 (www.shakespeares-globe.org). The production tours to Milton Keynes Theatre from November 16-20 (0844 871 7652, www.ambassadortickets.com/miltonkeynes).