Nikolai Gogol 
Inspector-General 
A Comedy in Five Acts

Although it may read to modern audiences like a hilarious slapstick comedy, The Inspector-General is actually much more than that. Famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol intended it to be a veiled but pointed satire of the ineptitude, corruption, and greed that exemplified the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. The witty play was later used as the basis for a movie version starring Danny Kaye (1949).