Laughter has seemed in short supply this January.

La Mirada Theatre, with its new production of the non-musical “The Play That Goes Wrong,” offers a vigorous antidote. Not scattered audience chuckles, but buckets of guffawing and rolling gales of belly-bending convulsions.

For instance, on opening night the guy to my left, nursing a bum shoulder and against the professional strain of having his focus on the local fires, murmured during the middle of the first act, “I’m worn out by laughing.” At intermission, he ruefully noted, “my shoulder is aching from all this.”

“The Play That Goes Wrong” has been a source of fun and a theatrical force since the British-born farce welled up from modest 2012 beginnings in a London theater/pub called the Old Red Lion.

Created by three writers who felt they were failing at improv comedy, a 2 a.m. idea was fleshed out in a few weeks and by 2015 the show had burgeoned up big enough to win an Olivier theater award for best comedy. A run in New York that began in 2017 survived the pandemic and is still going.

In this mounting, La Mirada is in its preferred do-it-yourself mode. The home cooking invariably makes for a good time just across the O.C. border and that’s the case with here.

The premise of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” a play that actually goes badly oh-so-rightly, is that somewhere in England the mythical Cornley Drama Society is eagerly but ineptly putting on an Agatha Christie-style whodunit.

On-stage disasters that strike the cast, the set and backstage a few times a minute prove that a village — provided it’s filled with idiots — can succeed by failing spectacularly.

Among the cascade of woes plaguing the hammy cast are mispronounced words, forgotten lines and actors who can’t hit a mark or respond to a cue to save the next 30 seconds, much less the play.

But try and try again they do and, further saddled with misplaced props on a shoddily built house of horrors set, every disaster ever seen on a stage seems certain to occur.

This is very broad, physical and old-school humor; “Pratfalls ‘R Us” could be the show’s motto. The certainty of new hijinks sure to be coming would seem likely to wear out an audience’s welcome.

But the triumph of “The Play That Goes Wrong” it that it busts through an invisible fourth wall of predictability.

The repetitiveness of some gags taps into our anticipatory glee (notable are the four characters who get stuck in a bizarre tape loop of a dialogue exchange as one character repeatedly trips over his next line).

Conversely, eagerness to encounter new, unexpected mishaps that may be coming next also propels audience giddiness.

Of course, what is quietly ticking away — including a grandfather clock that becomes the source of unexpected sleight of hand — is the craftmanship of top-notch director Eric Petersen.

Poor onstage timing laughs are the result of exquisitely timed gags. Physical blundering is the result of precisely blocked movement. Petersen’s phalanx of technical assistants (credits include a pyrotechnic designer and a fight coordinator) make all these pieces come together — and fall apart — so well.

In fact, at the show’s end, an unusual sight: not just the cast, but several of these behind-the-scenes stagehands came out on stage for well-deserved onstage bows.

That ensemble cast works terrifically well, both in individual characterizations of dunderheadedness and in the ensemble foul ups.

Notably funny comic turns come from Reggie De Leon, a beleaguered butler inking words he might not remember onto his hand and then bungling the pronunciations; John Sanders, eagerly doubling as the Cornley Society director and, onstage, as a prototypical stiff-upper-lip Scotland Yard-style inspector; Regina Fernandez and Mary Faber ultimately physically battling it out over which one of them gets to play the love interest; and Garrett Clayton, whose stiff, exaggerated movements and awkwardly precise gestures lead him to slavishly milk the audience for extra applause at every opportunity.

“The show must go on!” is a time immemorial rallying cry of live theater. Applied to “The Play That Goes Wrong” it could be almost a defiant, yet cheerful, threat for a show that uses laughter as its biggest building block.