The Pursuit of Happiness

The first narrative film ever produced was a comedy. In 1895, the Lumière Brothers’ L’Arroseur Arrosé ¹ earned the distinction of being the first motion picture to tell a story, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end. Prior to this, the motion itself was the novelty. With a runtime of just over a minute, The Waterer Watered offers its audience exposition, conflict and resolution in the familiar form of a setup, complication and punchline. The rudimentary plot consists of just this one joke, that of a man being tricked into spraying himself in the face with a hose and then spanking the culprit, so we can safely presume that its central purpose was to elicit laughter from an audience. Over the past 120 years, cinema has proven to be remarkably effective in this regard.