TAKE a floppy-haired Muppet. Dress it as a waiter. Rearrange its face until its features slope to one side. Throw it across the room. Repeatedly. If that puppet came to life it might look something like the actor Tom Edden in the British comedy “One Man, Two Guvnors,” now on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.

Although Mr. Edden has a scant 20 or so lines and just one big set piece in the two-and-a-half-hour show, he is doing some old-fashioned scene stealing and getting some of the biggest laughs of the season. Dressed in a ratty outfit, with a head of wispy white hair and heaps of makeup, Mr. Edden plays Alfie, a wild-eyed but slow-moving octogenarian waiter who is enlisted to help Francis (played by James Corden) serve his two bosses a pub lunch of soup, cold meats and chicken balls. The problem? It’s Alfie’s first day on the job. That and he has cataracts, is just this side of deaf, leans to one side, slurs his speech (it’s that contorted mouth), has a pacemaker and the shakes. Or as the script describes it, he’s “old, slow and doddery.”

Mr. Edden said: “He finds stairs and doors and plates and everyday objects a bit of a herculean trial. He’s doing his best.”

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Set in 1963 “One Man, Two Guvnors” comes from an English tradition of lowbrow comedy that’s naughty, playfully mean and slapstick happy. (The playwright Richard Bean based it on “The Servant of Two Masters,” an 18th-century Italian farce by Carlo Goldoni.) Over the course of the 25-minute dinner scene that ends Act I, Mr. Edden is put through a physical comedy regimen that would tax even the most seasoned clown. He gets dragged by the legs face down; takes a door, a cricket bat and bottle opener to the face; careers offstage on a cart; and takes a piggyback ride.

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“The whole show is a kind of reinvention of universal traditions of great comic archetypes of physical clowning and the indestructible old guy,” said Nicholas Hytner, the director of “One Man, Two Guvnors” and the artistic director of the National Theater in London, where the show had its premiere last year. “He’s playing a cartoon grotesque but he’s playing it for real.”