The Colonel is a farce in three acts by F. C. Burnand based on Jean François Bayard's Le mari à la campagne, first produced in 1844 and produced in London in 1849 by Morris Barnett, adapted as The Serious Family. The story concerns the efforts of two aesthetic impostors to gain control of a family fortune by converting a man's wife and mother-in-law to follow aestheticism. He is so unhappy that he seeks the company of a widow in town. His friend, an American colonel, intervenes to persuade the wife to return to conventional behavior and obey her husband to restore domestic harmony, and the colonel marries the widow himself.

Sir Francis Cowley Burnand, usually known as F. C. Burnand, was an English comic writer and prolific playwright, best known today as the librettist of Arthur Sullivan's opera Cox and Box.