What was the first comedy film? (1895)
TRANSCRIPTION
Acting Funny
Season 01 - Episode 01
Featured Film: L’Arroseur arrosé (directed by Louis Lumière)
Audio
SHANE RHYNE:
Welcome to Acting Funny, the podcast that takes comedy film seriously. I’m your host, Shane Rhyne- a stand up comedian, voice actor, and movie lover.
I’m hoping to see what I can learn about the 125-year history of comedy film, one year at a time, with the help of experts from around the world. Each episode of Acting Funny focuses on a single year where I’ll spotlight one film from that year to see what I can learn about the movies and the people who make us laugh.
And, I’m inviting you to join me as I learn from scholars, comedians, filmmakers and experts on a variety of topics. I hope together we’ll learn more about comedy, film, and ourselves.
Today, Acting Funny is going to the movies in the year 1895.
Today’s episode is sponsored by Offbeat Agent. The Offbeat Agent is Matt Ward, a comedian and real estate agent in Ohio. Buying or selling a home can be stressful, having someone who can keep you smiling through the process can be invaluable. Follow him on Instagram at offbeatagent. That’s offbeatagent at Instagram to learn more about Matt Ward and how he can help you buy or sell your next home in Ohio. And best of all, he’s totally not a douche.
[Offbeat Agent jingle]
SHANE:
Well, everything has to start somewhere, and this podcast starts right here. Welcome to the very first episode of Acting Funny.
In today’s episode we’re traveling to 1895 to look at the very first comedy film that movie goers ever bought a ticket to see. It’s L’Arroseur arrosé, or in English- The Sprinkler Sprinkled, directed by Louis Lumière and it shows how the Comedy Cinematic Universe begins not with a big bang, but with a squirt of water to the face.
It’s only a forty second film, but it generates lots of great conversation with today’s guests. In our main segment, I’ll discuss the story behind the Lumière brothers of France and get some answers to some nagging questions about their historic comedy film from professor Martin Barnier of the University Lumière-Lyon 2. And, we’ll wrap up with a fun conversation with two of my comedy pals in Knoxville, Tennessee: John Hurst and Aaron Littleton, who make big worlds of comedy from short films as co-hosts of the podcast Video Death Loop.
Since this is the first episode, I suppose introductions would be a good place to start. My name is Shane Rhyne. I’m a movie lover, a voice actor, and a standup comedian--
No, really. That’s me in the background performing at my album recording in 2019…
Recording of SHANE performing a stand-up comedy set:
I try to…figure out how to do the stepdad thing. It’s kind of fun...I feel like I have something in common with them. I was a step kid myself. So, I feel like we have something we can bond over and get used to. And I know for a fact one thing that every step kid knows: is that every step kid sees their stepfather as the President of the United States [audience laughter]. It’s true. Because first off, he’s not the guy you would have picked at all… [audience laughter]
SHANE:
Man, that guy’s good.
Well, even though statistically speaking you’ve never heard of me, I was having a good time performing comedy at bars, clubs, festivals, hotel ballrooms, and even a tattoo parlor once, before the pandemic arrived and totally changed everyone’s plans.
I wasn’t going to be on the road for a while and decided I needed to do something to keep the creative parts of my brain active and happy for the duration. For me, that meant finding some historical topic to research for my own amusement. Because that’s totally what a non-nerdy person like me would do.
As a life-long fan of comedy movies, I realized I didn’t have much knowledge about the history of comedy films. So, I decided to see what I could learn in my newly acquired free time. I finally got around to finishing Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography-- a Christmas gift from my oldest son a couple of years earlier. I watched documentaries about early personalities in cinema, including Pamela B. Green’s excellent 2019 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché. (We’ll talk more about that one in an upcoming episode), and with help from my oldest son- a soon-to-be-college graduate with a degree in media and communications, I acquired a film studies textbook (A History of Narrative Film by Dr. David Cook, to be exact) and set out on my way to see what I could teach myself.
And, I have to say, I was having a blast. At some point in the summer of 2020 I began to contemplate whether this topic might make a good podcast. And, well, I guess we’re about to find out.
The idea behind Acting Funny is deceptively simple. The first episode- this one- will explore a comedy film from 1895 and each subsequent episode will move forward one year in time, featuring one film from that year.
Some quick asides about the so-called rules of the podcast: I’m not an expert on film and I will not be presenting myself as such. At best, I have a surface knowledge of some of the household names, but not much beyond that. I am, as I said earlier, quite literally teaching myself about this as we go. If it’s going to raise your blood pressure if I don’t know who Zazu Pitts was, then I recommend for the sake of your health, that you seek out other forms of podcast entertainment.
If, however, it will bring a certain kind of joy to your heart to hear me discover the comedy of Zazu Pitts for the first time (or maybe for you to discover her comedy for the first time), then, by all means, jump in and ride with me. It’s going to be fun.
This is also not an attempt to identify the best comedies of all time, or even the best comedy of any given year. In fact, I can guarantee that sometimes the featured film of an episode’s year isn’t even very good at all. I’m seeking out films not for their box office or critical performance, but for what they have to teach me about comedy and film.
My working theory is that what we laugh at tells us a lot about who we are and what we value. I’m hoping to explore comedy films that show me how we’ve changed over time and what has remained universal.
I also want to look at how the way we watch films influences comedy. Whether we’re peeking through the individual viewfinder of an 1890s kinetoscope, stepping into the luxury of a 1930s motion picture palace, watching in a state-of-the-art IMAX auditorium, or streaming a movie at home on our laptop, the technology we use to access comedy can influence how the comedy is crafted.
And 2020 has certainly been a good year to consider questions like that. Theater chains, such as Regal Cinemas- headquartered here in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee- are threatened by bankruptcy during the pandemic. The mighty lion that was MGM Studios has put itself up for sale. Seemingly every movie you wanted to see in 2020 has been pushed back to some date to be determined. Tom Cruise is going door-to-door yelling at people about COVID protocols.
TOM CRUISE:
They say they believe in us and what we’re doing! I’m on the phone with every [bleep]...
SHANE:
It’s all a bit much right now.
So, it’s probably a good time to step back and realize that the film industry is in turmoil, but not for the first time. The people who make us laugh today are part of a long line of people who have braved major changes and disruptions in the film industry through wars, depressions, new technological rivals, changing cultural attitudes, and even past pandemics, all for the sake of making us laugh at moving pictures for a few moments of our day.
It’s a noble cause. In one of my favorite film comedies of all time, Preston Sturges’ 1941 classic Sullivan’s Travels, Joel McRea’s John “Sully” Sullivan has an epiphany:
JOEL MCREA as JOHN “SULLY” SULLIVAN:
There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.
SHANE:
And, so, this podcast begins with me on a journey, to learn what I can about the people who bring us something that’s better than nothing: laughter. And, I’m grateful to have you with me on this screwball adventure as I hopefully gain a deeper appreciation of some old favorites and learn new things about people previously unknown to me (and maybe unknown to you, too) who have kept this cockeyed caravan rolling for 125 years.
And it all starts in 1895, with a pair of brothers with an amazing invention, a gardener, and a little brat. And I have questions about all of it, right after this.
[MUSIC: Theme song excerpt]
SHANE:
A fun way to keep up with each episode of Acting Funny is to subscribe to The Banana Peel, a free monthly newsletter that gives subscribers an early peek at upcoming episode topics and guests, highlights blog posts from the website, and includes other useful news from the world of comedy films then and now.
To subscribe, simply visit the Acting Funny website at actingfunnypodcast.com, then complete the newsletter subscription form on the bottom of any page. You’ll get a welcome email to let you know your subscription has been added and then once a month I’ll send you news about future episodes and more.
And, it’s easy to forward to your friends who also might like to learn about Acting Funny and the films we’re discussing here.
Once again, you can subscribe to our free monthly newsletter by visiting actingfunnypodcast.com. Thanks for listening!
[MUSIC: Theme song fades]
SHANE:
Our film today is the 1895 French comedy L’Arroseur arrosé, or as it is known in English, The Sprinkler Sprinkled. It was directed by Louis Lumière, one half of the famous Lumière brothers. Louis and his brother Auguste are considered among the founding fathers of cinema. And, at only forty seconds long, it is easily one of the shortest films, if not the shortest, that we’ll explore in this series. A link to the film on YouTube is available in the show notes if you want to watch it before we go any further. I can easily wait 40 seconds for you to check it out, just hit pause and I’ll still be here when you come back in less time than it takes to watch a standard commercial break on television.
It’s a very simple film. At its heart it is nothing more than a recording of a popular practical joke. A gardener is watering his flowers. A mischievous boy sneaks up behind the gardener and puts his foot on the hose, stopping the flow of water. The confused gardener looks into the nozzle of the hose to see if he can ascertain the cause of the stoppage. The young boy sees his opportunity and removes his foot from the hose, causing a torrent of water to spray in his victim’s face. Then a short chase ensues with the gardener capturing the child and spanking him for his misdeeds. It almost took me longer to describe the film than the film’s actual length.
L’Arroseur arrosé had multiple public screenings in 1895, the year it was filmed. It was shown by the Lumière to friends and business people in their hometown of Lyon and then was screened in Paris later that year at the Society for the Development of National Industry. But, it is the public exhibition on December 28, 1895, 125 years to the day before this podcast was published, that earns the most attention from historians. For on this day, the Lumière brothers’ films were shown to a paying audience who filled a room at the Salon Indien du Grand Cafe, a Parisian coffee shop, to watch ten short films. And this, according to so many of the histories I’ve read so far, is the moment that cinema was born.
But, history is a tricky thing. It’s especially tricky in film history to safely declare anything as the first of its kind. And, I’ve been learning that very little of the Lumière showing on December 28, 1895, was truly a first of its kind.
The very first films were recorded in England and the United States around 1888 or 1889. The first public demonstrations of films were made in 1891 at Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey. By 1894, Edison’s kinetoscope machines were happily accepting nickels for individual showings at the world’s first kinetoscope parlor in New York.
Even in the race to show projected films to the public, rather than the one at a time fashion through the kinetoscope, it is not definitive that the Lumière brothers were first to the finish line. In the United States, Woodville Latham was hosting public demonstrations of his own projector system, the Eidoloscope, as early as May 1895 and another pair of inventors improved upon Latham’s ideas for their own projector demonstration in Atlanta, Georgia, in September of that year. Meanwhile, in Berlin, another pair of brothers, the Skladanowskys were demonstrating their Bioscop projector to paying audiences in November 1895, almost two full months before the legendary December 28 exhibition by the Lumière brothers.
So, what makes December 28, 1895, so special? Is it just that the French have a better public relations team? Perhaps, but I think there’s also another factor at work here.
It is in our nature to single out the first of something as the important development, but in reality victory belongs not to the first to create an invention, but to the first to make the invention easy to use. And, that is why the Lumière brothers have the spotlight. Regardless of whatever imperfections the cinematograph had, it was still easier to use and more reliable than any of the inventions competing for the marketplace.
Part of the genius of the cinematograph was that it was three pieces of technology in one. It was a camera recording motion pictures on film. But, with a few quick adjustments it was also the device used to develop that film. And, with a few further quick adjustments, it became the projector to show the film to an audience. And, voila, you only need to train a person to work this one machine to make and show a complete film. And that will make all the difference. It is so easy to use that the word invented by the Lumière brothers for their new machine, the cinematograph, will lead to the invention of the word for motion pictures itself: cinema.
There are some other interesting things about this movie that stand out and lead me to questions. For one, the poster advertising the December 28 showing depicts an audience watching a scene from The Sprinkler Sprinkled. That likely means our featured film today is the first movie to show a scene from the movie on its poster. Not a monumental historic achievement, but I think a noteworthy one. So, why did the Lumière brothers single this film out of the ten for that honor?
Likewise, it is the only film of the ten that could be described as a fictional narrative. The brothers remade this film two more times, and it was copied additional times by other filmmakers around the world. I wondered why the film stood out to the Lumière brothers enough that they would bother to remake it two more times? Why did this happen?
And, another thing I’ve been wondering about is what happened to the Lumière brothers in the history of cinema itself? They certainly show up with a bang in 1895, but they never seem to make any real effort to go into the emerging movie business. Other inventors, including Edison, start their own film companies to begin producing not just technology, but content as well. But, not the brothers Lumière. As I kept reading, I noted their seeming disappearance from the film business almost entirely by the turn of the century.
But, even as they seemed to withdraw from the scene, their invention was crisscrossing the globe at an unprecedented pace. While reading articles from the excellent Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, I noted that entries were made for different countries identifying when the first film was recorded or exhibited in that nation. Shockingly, I realized that by 1897 or 1898, people in a majority of the world’s countries had seen a film by the Lumière brothers or one of their emerging competitors. How did the Lumière brothers accomplish this feat in the final years of the 19th century? And why, did they not capitalize on this success by making more movies? There is no film studio or production company that bears their name. However, there is a university named for the brothers Lumière. And it is there that I will find my first guest, who will help me answer some of these questions about the brothers Lumière and L’Arroseur arrosé.
My first guest on Acting Funny today is Martin Barnier, a professor of film studies at the University Lumière Lyon 2 in France. Professor Barnier primarily researches the evolution of sound in cinema, as well as the history of 3D films and other technologies and is working on co-authoring a book about the Lumiere brothers. He was gracious enough to allow me to interview him remotely from his home in Lyon to teach me about the Lumière brothers and their 1895 comedy The Sprinkler Sprinkled.
SHANE (to MARTIN BARNIER):
Well, thank you so much for spending your time with me. I just want to start with that. I know you are very busy. But, I was so happy that you were able to do this. But, let’s start with this because you are in Lyon. Can you tell me just a little bit of an overview of who the Lumière brothers are? What’s their story? What’s their family story?
MARTIN BARNIER:
Ok. So, the Lumière father, Antoine, he was born in a very poor family in France in the middle of the 19th century. And, the first job he had was to paint signs on shops. And later, he was interested by the photography that was beginning to be very important in France. And, he opened a shop where he was receiving people. In his store, it was possible to have a photography of the family for a wedding or any kind of important event. He decided to move from Besançon, where his sons Louis and Auguste were born, (and they also had sisters later). And Antoine Lumière decided to come to Lyon because it’s a bigger city than Besançon. And, he became quite famous as a photographer.
The sons were very interested by the chemical process of photography. So, they were working with him, helping to process the photography from the negative to the positive and the system of printing photography and so on.
One of the two brothers, when he was 15 years old, invented a system of a better chemical element for the photography. And at that moment, when they begin to use that chemical- it worked very well. They made better photography. It was quicker. And that way, the family (business) had the possibility to get bigger because they were not only making photography, but also producing the slides to be able to sell them for other photographers.
The problem was that Antoine Lumière, the father, ...he liked to live an expensive life. The expensive life, like going to the theater. He was singing. The family had trouble when one of the two brothers went to the military service. The money was getting out of the family so quick, because the father was not very interested in being better at the business and that was a real problem.
So the two brothers, when one of them came back from the military service, they decided they would have to be at the head of the business. And the father has to stay-- he will receive money, but he has nothing to do anymore with deciding something with the business. And at that moment they were very young. I think one of them was 18 or 19 years old and the other was 21. And they were building the factory. And the factory became the biggest factory in France for producing specific slides for photography. They were called “plaque etiquettes bleue” in French, so that’s the blue label slides…
When they began to lead the business to be the best in their work in this factory they became very wealthy because they were selling millions of slides each year. In 1895, the year that is interesting for us, because that’s the moment they were also creating the cinematograph, they had 300 workers in the factory. So, at that moment they were already very wealthy. The father was very happy because he was able to spend the money. Especially because he was buying places in very nice cities like Chamonix, like La Ciotat in the south of France. And each time he would build a big house.
SHANE:
You mentioned the cinematograph a few times. Let’s talk a little bit about that. What we know about Edison and the others...we’ve been watching films one at a time in the kinetograph, or actually the kinetoscope. So how do we get to the Lumière and their invention? What causes this to move in this direction?
MARTIN:
They knew of the kinetoscope. Antoine Lumière, the father, he explains to his sons, “I’ve seen this invention in Paris that will be nice if you do something better. I think you can do something better.”
And Auguste Lumière said, “I was the first to work on it, but one night my brother…”
So, they knew the kinetoscope, that’s for sure. Because the kinetoscope was shown in France and one store was selling kinetoscopes very close to a store in Paris that was owned by the Lumières for the photography slides. So, Auguste Lumière said he was working on a system to project instead of looking at a very little image in the kinetoscope. So, the idea of projection. That is, of course, a very long tradition of magic lantern. And there were other people working on that.
What is important is that Auguste Lumière and his brother Louis Lumière, according to them, were working on the idea of projection and filming and going from the negative to the positive film and projecting the positive, they were stopped by the system of the crank. The system of getting something smooth on the image and quick enough so you can have the illusion of movement, but was not destroying the film when you were cranking.
And that was the problem.
So the solution that was-- according to the legend of what the brothers said-- was found during a night when Louis was sick and he had a fever and during the night he was thinking of the sewing machine. And the sewing machine has a system of two grips...and you know the grips take the textile, and they said the grips could take the film, holes by holes, and take that with regularity. And that idea, inspired by the sewing machine, helped him to write it down and to ask one of the technicians working with them and the factory to build the cinematograph. According to them it is the end of 1894 that they had the idea and Louis was having this fever-night that led to the imagination of the invention. And in February 1895 was the date when they have the official brevet [English translation: patent] of the cinematograph. So that’s the way of the creation of the machine.
SHANE:
Wow. So they basically have created a machine now that lets them not only film movies, but they also can use the same machine to develop the film…
MARTIN:
Exactly.
SHANE:
...and then also convert it again and then it projects the film. That’s the big change really from the kinetoscope at this point...
MARTIN:
Exactly.
SHANE:
...Instead of one person at a time they can now show it to a room full of people. And I guess they go about now filming...making movies...so they can show how this works because that’s more or less the point. And as I can tell from looking at the films, a lot of them are literally just them going around town or their home making some quick snapshots almost we would call like little YouTube videos of factory workers leaving their factory, the train pulling into the station, feeding their baby, these sorts of things. I know there were ten films. Am I correct that there were ten films that they used in the premier showing?
MARTIN:
Yeah. Well, the premier showing is supposed to be the 28th of December 1895, but it’s the official premiere with people paying for a ticket.
SHANE:
Yes. They had an earlier show…
MARTIN:
Yes, there were shows before. There were shows before in Lyon on 22 of March 1895 they were showing, according to what I’ve seen, they were showing L’Arroseur arrosé, already the 22 of March. So, it is supposedly filmed just before, between the 20th and the 22nd, because around the 20th is the date of filming the workers leaving the factory. So, it’s March 1895 anyway. We don’t know exactly.
And so, the idea of a film with a little script, nothing was written but the idea of having narration, of having a little story, of course it is linked to this first...to L’Arroseur arrosé, but you also these other films… I don’t know if you’ve seen the ten first?
SHANE:
I’ve seen…I think I’ve seen many of them, but I don’t know if I’ve seen all ten. I’ve seen several of them: the factory workers, the train, the feeding the baby.
MARTIN:
The train is not presented…
SHANE:
It’s not one of them? Oh, okay.
MARTIN:
No. No.
SHANE:
Oh. I thought it was.
MARTIN:
No. There is no train film in 1895.
SHANE:
Oh, ok.
MARTIN:
It is filmed in 1896. The beginning of… probably January 1896 is the first version of the train arriving in La Ciotat. And very quickly they made a second version. For many films like L’Arroseur arrosé there are three versions filmed by the Lumière because the negative was used to develop the film again and again. So, it was used. It was destroyed by the machine and they needed to have a new negative. And this new negative...sometimes they say it is a remake, but it’s just that it was necessary to print more copies of the film. You see?
SHANE:
Oh, that answers my question. I wondered why they kept remaking this film. I was like, “Well are they so in love with it that they just keep redoing it?”
MARTIN:
No.
SHANE:
That makes sense. It was just that the negative was being damaged by the constant duplication…
MARTIN:
Exactly.
SHANE:
Ok, that answers a big question for me. I was just very curious as to why they bothered to make this film three times. So, what were the films that were in that group of the first showings in March, and I think they did one in June also, am I right? In Paris?
MARTIN:
There are versions that were first for the presentation of friends that were in the association of photography. So, photographers. And also, in June, in Paris for the association of industrial development in France. We are working on that. But probably, many people could enter. It was for free. And so people who were interested in new inventions and people who were not directors of factories could be there also. And then the father, Antoine Lumière, rents a room in the Cafe Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and that was December 1895 and that’s the famous moment, the 28th, when they invited people from show business in Paris- theater owners, Georges Méliès because he made a magic theater show. I don’t know how to pronounce it quite.
SHANE:
Oh, I know he does the...he’s the manager of the Robert Houdin Theatre.
MARTIN:
Yes…
SHANE:
So he manages the magic show. Magic show.
MARTIN:
Magic show, yes. And the other theater owners were present for the presentation. And they supposedly asked Antoine Lumière to buy the invention to have another camera and projector. And he said, “No. You won’t get any money with that. It’s just an invention that will attract people for one year or two and then it will stop.” So, that is the legend. We don’t really know because it was written years later according to Méliès, according to the owner of the Olympia Theater and other music halls they said that he said that. So, he probably said something like that.
SHANE:
Seems interesting because it seems very much like he’s on a sales tour with these shows. He’s trying to drum up interest in this device based on the audiences he’s showing it to: photographers, industrial people, and now show business people. It seems odd to me that he would try to discourage people from buying it after he’s gone to all of this trouble to show it.
MARTIN:
Yeah, we don’t know exactly, but maybe to make some publicity, it’s possible. And then to let everybody know that they were the owner and inventor of something very important and at the same time a scientific invention. But, yes, some elements are still missing.
SHANE:
Just like film itself. That makes sense. So the films they’re showing, the word I’ve seen is “actualities”? Or, they’re just basically…
MARTIN:
Yeah, nobody was calling it that at that time because they were just… today we would say “documentary film of life in 1895,” but what we have is people getting out of the factory, young boys playing in a park, the baby that is fed by the father and the mother, and so it’s like the everyday life. But what I wanted to say is that even if L’Arroseur arrosé is the most famous, but you also have little gags, little comic films with soldiers because very close to the factory there was a regiment of the French army and they were asking some soldiers to do some little comic sketch, you know, a routine. So, there is a comic routine of someone who wanted to… he tried to get up on the horse. He’s falling again and again. It’s one of the ten first films. They have many little gags like that. Many comic films. Several.
The only with a real, let’s say “script” between quotation marks, of course, would be Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle, that is the first title, that is The Gardener and the Little Brat. So this was the first title and then in the catalog they used L’Arroseur et arrosé. That means The Sprinkler and Sprinkled.
AND sprinkled. So, there are little differences in the titles. We know that the first boy could be Benoît Duval, that’s the name supposedly. The gardener was François Clerc, like the truck, because we know who was the gardener for the Lumière. So, we have the name of the two first people.
For the remake, that was made for the negative as we explained, it’s supposed to be another boy, a young boy Léon Trotobas. I found that, but I’m not sure. There are many questions on the people. François Clerc, the gardener? That’s for sure that he was the one.
And, as you know, the second version is at a different angle so that you can have the action in the direct...you don’t need to have the gardener to take back the kid and get him closer to the camera to be able to beat him. So, the second one is better for the angle. But it’s also one year later. Because the first one is supposed to be filmed on the 22nd of March 1895, and the second version is during the spring of 1896. And the third version is during the summer of 1896. You see there are difference because they are using the camera more and more.
We know that Louis Lumière, but we don’t know the other operators. The first one was made by Louis Lumière. They were thinking like photographers. They were thinking that in the camera you needed to have a good angle. You need to have a good perspective. You need to have everything that is in the frame and not outside the frame.
So, that’s why it’s very funny to see that the gardener is taking back the kid and is trying to be just in the front of the camera because they are asking for it of course. And in one of the versions you see that the kid when he is getting out is looking at the camera. Is taking a view of the camera to see if everything is all right. And if…
SHANE:
I love that moment. It’s so great. When I watch that, I always love that part when the little boy just turns and looks at the camera. And you can almost see it in his eyes, “Was that good? Does that work?...”
MARTIN:
Exactly. That’s probably what he wanted to say.
SHANE:
“I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want to get spanked again. Please, did that work?”
MARTIN (laughs):
Yeah, that’s right.
SHANE:
I wonder if François Clerc knows that we’re still talking about his gardening 125 years later? If he knew that while he was doing it that we’d still be talking about him watering the garden?
MARTIN:
Yeah, probably not. Probably not. I have to say that we don’t know exactly where it was filmed. Because you the city of La Ciotat where they later filmed the train arriving in the station and that is where they have this huge mansion. It was called Palais Lumière. It is still called Palais Lumière. When you go there the house still exists although it has been transformed into many apartments because no one can own such… It became a hotel at one moment during the 20s, 30s.
I just had one idea that I wanted to add that The Gardener and the Little Brat they were filming it also in La Ciotat. We don’t know exactly if it was in the garden at Lyon where they had a big house just close to the factory and in between there is a garden. And still today, there is one of the houses still there. And it has transformed into a museum and the rest of the factory is transformed into a movie theater and it’s like a cinematheque where you can watch very old movies and there is a film festival for old movies, restored films. So, there was this garden in Lyon and probably one of the versions is filmed in Lyon. But, there is also the huge garden in La Ciotat, in the south of France, as the light was better. It is probable one of the versions was probably filmed over there. But, we’re not for sure. I don’t have the answer for the moment. So I wanted to add this.
SHANE:
Sure. That makes sense that one of them might be filmed near the factory if they were also filming scenes from the factory at roughly the same time. That makes sense that that might possibly be.
I guess one of the questions I have as we near the end of this is that they seem they were aware that this movie particularly, this little film, was important as a standout amongst the others because it is featured on the poster for the exhibition. Did they see that this film was somehow special compared to the others? Did they think this would be the one people would talk about the most?
MARTIN:
The hypothesis here is that we have the reaction of the people that was very important, that is the first spectators were laughing at this moment and they were finding it as the best one and a real good comic film so probably it is why and it is logical because of the reaction of the people at that moment.
SHANE:
So, from my conversation with Professor Barnier at this point I’ve already learned my answers to the questions about why the Lumière brothers “remade” this film two more times and even have a better idea of why the film was the one featured on the public exhibition poster. I still was curious to learn how the Lumière brothers were able to successfully get their invention around the world in such a short time. Professor Barnier was able to shed some light on that for me, also.
MARTIN:
They were asking young photographers, people that were not afraid of “the adventure” like they said when they were asking people to come. And they paid them to be able to go far away, everywhere in the world to present their films and to film the new places, the exotic places and to come back to France with the films. And that’s why the cinematograph is probably one of the first inventions that is seen around the world in less than two years. You have everywhere, in every capital in every country, the cinematograph is shown at one moment or another in 1896 or 1897.
SHANE:
That was something that I was actually surprised to learn. I was reading in The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema and there’s entries for different countries and that entry will tell you when the first film was shown in that country or made in that country. And I was truly shocked to see that most of them were in 1896. It was in 1895 that they invent the machine and by 1896, 1897, 1898, most of the world has at least seen a film. And to me that was stunning how quickly this device just covered the globe. But it’s the Lumière sending out these young men just for content, they need content. They’re going to get it and bring it back and, of course, along the way probably sell a few of these elsewhere as they go. But, I’m just stunned at how rapid that expansion was when you think about other inventions and how long it takes them to travel the globe. And this one it seemed to go almost literally overnight.
MARTIN:
Because there is a competition with Edison. Edison, once he understands that it’s better to have projection instead of having the kinetoscope, he will change the device and projection will be made very quickly by engineers working for Edison like Dickson. And he is sending people all over the world in competition with the Lumière. So you have operators that were sent by Edison and operators sent by Lumière and they are rushing to be the first in this city and in this city. So this explains also why you have this spreading all over the world because they were in competition also.
SHANE:
Another question I have that interests me- I’m curious about it- because they didn’t do something that most of the other inventors I’ve been reading about did. They never seemed to really get serious about getting into the movie business. They stayed, it seems, purely on the technology side. There’s no Lumière Studio. There’s no Lumière Pictures or anything like that. They’re making this cinematographs, these cameras and projectors, but they don’t ever seem interested in saying, “Hey, let’s get in the movie business,” even though there’s no such thing as the movie business yet. But, the others, you can see Edison does this and Méliès and Robert Paul. They get into the movie business and adopt that as part of what they’re doing, in addition to the technology. But the Lumière don’t. Why do you think that is?
MARTIN:
They were first really really interested by inventing new things. So, once they have made the chemical for the etiquettes bleue and it is working and the factory will produce these things until the 1950s. That is, they can do what they want. They have plenty of money and they can invent something else. Once it’s invented, they can use it for two years, three years, and it’s the way they were thinking of “We don’t really need to have a business with the cinematograph. It’s working. It’s perfect. Ok, let’s do something else.” I think it is something like that.
SHANE:
That’s fascinating. I love that answer. I love that thought, because like I’d said what I’d seen with all the other people I’ve been reading about and learning about, that's not the way they go. They invent this or they develop a new piece of it and then they dive right into making movies as a business. And the Lumière were kind of a standout in that regard because they don’t do that. It makes sense, though, in what you’re saying that they’ve got enough money, they don’t need to become Hollywood, too.
MARTIN:
And the two brothers. They were inventing things. They were creating new systems like the cinematograph, but also during the first world war an artificial hand to give back the possibility to get something with the hand for the people that lost their arm during the war.
SHANE:
Oh wow. I didn’t know that.
MARTIN:
Yeah. They were creating also something that we call “gauze Lumière.” It means… I don’t know how to explain in English, but when you are burned, when the burning is very deep, you can use that and put it on your hand or arm or anywhere and it will help to cure it.
SHANE:
Oh, I know what you’re talking about. I’m trying to remember the name of that we use here, but it’s like a gauze…
MARTIN:
You put it around…
SHANE:
...you wrap it around and it helps the skin graft to itself.
MARTIN:
Yeah. Exactly. Another invention is that Louis Lumière was talking with friends one day in the Parc de la Tête d’Or, that is a beautiful garden, a public garden in the park in the city of Lyon. And he had his arm on the table and he had a fan. Ok? Because it was very hot. And doing that [waving the fan] he understands that the voice of the friends was passing through the table and through the fan and it made it louder. And so, he invented the loudspeaker.
SHANE:
Oh! Ok…
MARTIN:
He is one of the inventors of the loudspeaker and the system that he created was then used by Gaumont for loudspeakers. You know that it’s cardboard that is vibrating in the loudspeaker and that’s Louis Lumière.
SHANE:
Wonderful!
MARTIN:
And I can give you one other example. Auguste Lumière was much more involved in medical things, like the artificial arm I was speaking about or he also created like a hospital, a private hospital helping people with medical things that were very avant-garde at the time like massages, like baths, like things that were not too intrusive for the people and much more on the side of a “smooth medicine” or a smooth medical way of helping and curing the people.
And Louis Lumière he was also thinking again to the cinema system in the 1920s he invented a system of color film, to have films in colors, because they were working also with photography in colors. They invented a system in 1906 that was working very well for colors in photography. And one last invention, in 1935, Louis Lumière made an invention of 3-D stereooptic film system.
SHANE:
So, wow! So, the Lumière brothers fingerprints all quite literally over a lot of our modern lives still today then. All of the things they worked on then, we’re still using and benefitting from now. It’s not just about a film about a gardener and a hose [laughs].
MARTIN:
[laughs] No, not only. I think the total is more than 200 inventions. Official inventions.
SHANE:
That’s one of the things I’m loving about this project. I keep learning new things about these people. All the different film makers, such as Robert Paul and others, the things they’re inventing besides this. It’s amazing to me that they’re names aren’t even better known than they are. It’s amazing to me.
Professor, thank you for teaching me. I am grateful for you spending your time with me today. I hope you and your family are staying safe and happy in Lyon and enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you so much.
MARTIN:
Thank you, Shane. Bye-bye.
SHANE:
Bye.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
I want to thank professor Martin Barnier for taking the time to teach me about the Lumière brothers today. I truly did learn some fascinating new information about them and their films. You’ll find links in this episode’s show notes to some of the films and other topics we discussed. You can find the show notes in the episodes section of the podcast website at actingfunnypodcast.com.
Thanks also to Dr. Matthew Solomon at the University of Michigan for helping to connect me to Martin Barnier. You’ll get to hear my interview with Dr. Solomon in our episode of the year 1896. More about that at the end of this episode.
SFX (Audio clips from movies and movie trailers)
[HOME ALONE]
*loud crash*
MACAULAY CULKIN as KEVIN MCCALLISTER:
You guys give up, or are you thirsty for more?
[DENNIS THE MENACE]
MOVIE TRAILER NARRATOR:
Dennis the Menace.
MASON GAMBLE as DENNIS:
That’s me!
MOVIE TRAILER NARRATOR:
America’s classic kid in a classic American comedy.
[FREE WHEELING]
ESTELLE ETERRE as NURSE:
You little rascal, you!
[PROBLEM CHILD]
MOVIE TRAILER NARRATOR
He’s mad. He’s bad. He’s seven.
MICHAEL OLIVER as JUNIOR:
I’m gonna be eight in two weeks!
SHANE:
You just heard a selection of audio clips from the 1990 holiday favorite Home Alone, the cinematic trailer for Dennis the Menace from 1993, and dialogue from the 1932 MGM Our Gang short “Free Wheeling,” as well as the cinematic trailer for the 1990 comedy Problem Child.
As I’m learning about the history of film comedy, I’m also looking for context in how these films from the past still influence the comedies we make and watch today. The aforementioned Dr. Matthew Solomon pointed out to me in my interview with him that the Lumiere brothers film inspired so many copycats that it started a whole sub-genre of films in the 1890s centered around little boy pranksters who inevitably get their comeuppance with a spanking or some other punishment by the film’s conclusion.
It got me thinking that it must surely be a cyclical thing to make films about bratty kids and the lessons they have to learn and the lessons they have to teach us, because I remember a whole slew of films like this from the 1990s. The iconic Home Alone stands out, but it was not the only one even that year as the somewhat less-than-iconic, but just has heavily sequeled Problem Child was released that same year. Along the way you had movie reboots of the comic strip character Dennis the Menace, and numerous other movies about bad kids who do terrible things, but are really good kids deep inside, maybe. And then there’s Clifford from 1994, in which a 40-something Martin Short plays 10-year-old Clifford. And honestly, that one may have mercifully killed off the genre for another century.
Film isn’t the only place I can look for context. Another idea that fascinates me is how modern comedy performance can be influenced, directly or indirectly, by these films from our past. And so, from time to time, I’ll be bringing in guests from around the world of comedy to talk about the areas where I think their modern lives intersect with these older films.
For this episode, I reached out to a pair of comedy friends of mine who spend a lot of time thinking about 30-second films. I hope the extra ten seconds of The Sprinkler Sprinkled doesn’t prove to be a problem for them.
Joining me today on Acting Funny are two friends from the comedy scene in Knoxville, Tennessee: John Hurst and Aaron Littleton. John is a chip tune musician known as Doc Isaac. He also performs standup and sketch comedy as a co-producer of Knoxville’s long-running experimental comedy show Friendlytown. Aaron is a long-time member of Einstein Simplified, an improv comedy troupe with a 25-year history in Knoxville and he is also the creator of the world-famous Tumblr blog The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day which is exactly what is advertised. Together, they are the co-hosts of a popular podcast known as Video Death Loop in which they take turns each week surprising one another with a short video they must watch on loop until one of them loses their mind.
This ability to make big comedy out of small pieces of media is what inspired me to reach out to them for this episode. I wanted to know what they thought of this famous 40-second movie and how they found comedy inspiration in something as simple as a photo or an obscure tv commercial. I spoke to them remotely from their homes in Knoxville during the pandemic.
AARON LITTLETON:
Did anyone...did anyone else get...apart from “Ok, this is just old-timey”...did anyone else get the 2020 “Aw man. Spanking isn’t cool” when you watched this? Were there like other social forces that made you think that. Because I did. I was like, “Oh, man. Ooh. Ooh.”
SHANE:
I will admit I showed this to my daughter and she immediately reacted that way. She said, “That’s...that’s not cool.”
AARON:
Yeah. Hitting. I’m the father of a four-year-old and we don’t hit to solve problems in this house.
SHANE:
We hit to cause problems.
JOHN HURST:
It’s interesting that even...one thing I was looking at afterwards on my own, I was like, “How did this turn out?” Like you said, it kind of became a genre of punishing the brat, basically. The Ramones, “Beat on the Brat,” basically. But even the Lumières they did...there were a lot of copycats...even the Lumières did another...they did reboots before reboots were cool.
SHANE:
They refilmed this movie three times.
JOHN:
Three! I only found two.
SHANE:
What’s interesting to me...maybe, I don’t know I’ll have to go back and make sure...I think it was three times they filmed it...three, oh counting the original I guess. But, they did reboot this film. And this in the days before copyright in film exists. Anybody who developed their own camera this seems to be then their go-to movie to make to show how good their technology is, because they make their own version of the Sprinkler. With a kid, hose, spanking, the whole bit.
JOHN:
You don’t need a whole lot to make that whole scene. You just need to get a gardener, a brat, yeah, everything you said there.
SHANE:
These are our props. This is what we need. And so, there’s that. It’s fascinating. And it tells me also, that we always talk about Hollywood being an industry of monkey see, monkey do. They see a successful thing so the next ten studios also remake that successful thing and that’s how you end up with 47 superhero movies in one summer or something like that. And, this starts that. Quite literally. Oh, we need a spanking kid movie, too. That was all the rage. It made all of ten francs last year
AARON:
Was that in Euros?
JOHN:
Well, what I was going to say there is that even the reboot. The reboot is just as long. All they do instead is they do a firm kick to the kid and then sprinkle him with water.
AARON:
They kick the child?!
JOHN:
Well, they kick him in the butt. It’s like… I guess it’s like… it’s not like a ten second, fifteen second long spanking, spank-o-rama…
SHANE:
It’s not an American History X curb stomping, Aaron. It’s…
AARON and JOHN:
[laughter]
JOHN:
That’s a darker movie.
AARON:
Do they get to the point where they kick the kid in the balls? I will watch that movie. I will laugh.
SHANE:
No. That’s when we get to Home Alone. Actually I love this conversation that we’ve had, but I want to spin it now in a minute to another topic, which is the reason I wanted you guys here. Because I want to talk about what you do in comedy and tell me a little bit about Video Death Loop in your words, Aaron, John, whoever wants to take that and kind of explain it to me.
JOHN:
Um, Aaron, do you want to go first?
AARON:
Sure, yeah. So Video Death Loop is, well I think you said at the beginning of the episode, it’s a show where we watch a short film on repeat and we… honestly when we started Video Death Loop it was not Video Death Loop, when we started it we called it Aaron and John Watch. It was a YouTube series where you could actually watch the video along with us. And we just said let’s just watch this for an hour and see what happens.
JOHN:
Yeah, we had a hard limit and we didn’t go under. We had to watch it for an hour. So, that was a bad start there.
AARON:
Yeah. I think it was a very smart idea when we decided we would let one of us decide we had watched it enough because there were very clearly times in earlier episodes where we had reached a peak and we did not recover ever to that peak again. It’s like, boy if that one hour time limit which has been thrust upon us by the gods didn’t exist this would have been pretty watchable, but as it is… WAIT A MINUTE! WHA-WHA-WHAT? We can just stop? Uh, yeah, so we watch a video and usually it becomes some kind of long form improv storytelling between the two of us as we sort of dig into the edges and the corners that you don’t really pay much attention to until you sit there and watch this commercial for Mentos on loop about a hundred times.
JOHN:
Yeah, it becomes kind of a world-building exercise at a time. Because you’re stuck. When we’re watching it, we’re actively watching it on loop. And we’re an audio-based podcast, so the viewer at home can play along it they want to, but we have got to describe the detail. And maybe we don’t sometimes. Sometimes our reaction to it becomes the building of the world.
SHANE:
Well, I have to say that’s actually my favorite part of the concept is that it is audio and that I have to imagine the video. Often times I have not seen the thing that you all are talking about. But, within a couple of loops, I feel like I know exactly what I’m supposed to be watching. As you guys go with it.
AARON:
Right. Yeah, it started out as one thing and it had all this extraneous stuff that it didn’t need. And as we kept going along, everything just kept getting shaved down. You know, there’s no film of us. Then eventually there’s no film of the video we were watching and we could stop it whenever we wanted to because we saw the value of the thing we were responding to. The thing our very early audience was responding to were the stories that we were coming up with. And now it’s almost like...especially during the pandemic...I have a very hard time putting my finger on what this show really is anymore. Because in a way it’s just, “I get to talk to John tonight. Because I haven’t seen him in a year. And it’s going to be awesome. But it’s just going to be two friends hanging out and talking. We’re doing this show, but I feel so far removed from it, from that initial idea is anymore.
JOHN:
Yeah, it’s been the only thing that’s been consistent throughout the pandemic especially. If I didn’t have this, I would go insane, like really. It’s something to do...it’s weird to say the thing where we watch on a thing on loop until we go insane is keeping me sane, but that’s what happening.
AARON:
Yeah. I guess we watch things on loop until real life forces us to stop.
SHANE:
How do you go about picking your material? Because that gets me back to where we started talking about short form entertainment. Do you find that certain types of material work better than others? I mean, it would seem like commercials have built in stories of their own anyway, with a little universe of their own that you guys can just destroy at will and rebuild in your own image. Are there types of material that you actively seek out when you’re trying to do this?
JOHN:
Yeah, the easy ones are anything that’s already a pocket of a story in there like the opening to a TV show. You’re already kind of telling a story through that music. Usually with those there’s a collage of different scenes that you can kind of play off or make a story out of like a commercial or something. But sometimes there’s just weird little nuggets of time where something so weird and it’s telling story in that small narrative. But, it’s also a thing where I think, “This will make Aaron very uncomfortable.”
There was one where there was a video game convention where they were having to listen to...they were showing a brand new video game and they were playing the opening theme from that video game and they were just playing the song. There was no video to it or anything. It was just the creator and the composer up on stage just kind of like listening along and then it would cut to different camera angles. It was just this weird awkward moment where no one is...it’s like “Ok, we’re supposed to be listening to the theme here.” But everyone is trying to act cool and not...there’s a story happening here. There’s this weird moment. This awkward moment. No one knows quite sure what to do, but they’re doing the best they can.
AARON:
It’s like when people sing “Happy Birthday to You” and no one still has figured out you’re supposed to do while people are singing “Happy Birthday to You.” It’s a whole stage full of very professional people all doing that all at the same time. Because someone down the line thought, “Oh, it will be great to debut this song and we’re all just going to sit around and listen.”
JOHN:
Yeah. Two minutes long of this.
AARON:
I think those are my favorite videos. Not necessarily where people are acting awkward, but where this is a video that comes from some larger corporation or something that has a lot of money or has talent and yet they still somehow goof up and create some very strange piece of film or very strange reaction from the people on the film. That little bit of humanity shines through all the gloss, to where we can say, “Yes, yes, yes, yes. There’s something there, because we can get into this guy’s head.”
If it’s too overly produced, if it’s too slick, and you cannot see the humanity then there’s very little for us to build on I find.
SHANE:
Let’s talk real quick about some of the other things that you do, though. John, real quickly, let’s talk about your music if you don’t mind. I’d like to hear a little bit about what’s going in that world, because John also is, if I may say so, Doc Isaac a chip tune and what else do you do?
JOHN:
Chip tune, nerdcore rap. It depends on what day it feels like on the calendar. So, I’m like, “Hm. I think I’m a chip tune artist today” and I’ll click that off and then “Nope, nope. It’s time to make more hip hop music.” So, I kind of go all over the place really. But, I’ll make songs on a Gameboy and then bring it to…I’ll take it to shows and then open for other acts and stuff like that and just have a good time. I kind of play, when I’m doing it live, I get to pretend to be a lounge singer. It’s only just me up there and it’s not very interesting just me up on the stage with the microphone. But if I’m out in the audience kind of playing and interacting that’s a lot of fun to both me and the audience, I hope.
SHANE:
Now, how did you get into chip tunes? I had not heard of it until I met you. Tell me about it.
JOHN:
I’m one of those people who grew up in the 90s on the Internet finding out and seeing a lot of people doing random different things and I like video games. No surprise there. Being able to...kind of growing up and listening to music on bleeps and bloops like from an NES, Supernintendo, Gameboy, some of those tunes I still hum and still have stuck in my head to this very day. I was literally playing “Ken’s Theme” from Street Fighter 2 on the bass a couple of hours ago.
So, like anything that’s old and disregarded, people start to experiment and try to do weird things. You’ll see a lot of people glitch Nintendo systems and make video artwork. Kind of like what you do with cassette tapes, where there’s a bunch of people like noise artists, who use cassette tapes where they’ll dip them in tar and then put them in a cassette deck and make weird noises just for the sake of it. Kind of almost as a performance piece. And this is almost an extension on that where it’s like, “Hey, what music can we make on a Nintendo system or a Gameboy and stuff.”
There’s a program I use to actually make it on a Gameboy called LSDJ and kind of go from there. It fits in my pocket and I don’t have to do a whole lot. I can just do everything from a Gameboy, so just make music from that. So, it’s kind of great on the go. If I’m on an airplane and don’t have a lot of room… “Let me see if I can make a little beat” or a little something with that. But I was hearing other people making original songs with stuff like that and I thought that would be fun to do. And over time I just thought “Why don’t I put words to it?”
There’s a rapper by the name of YT Cracker, but he does a lot of…he’s the first time I ever heard nerdcore rap. And he had an album called Nerdrap Entertainment System he just released on the Internet for free. It was just him wrapping to Megaman beats in the background and it just blew my mind. It was one of those rare moments when I felt like, “I can do this.” And that’s what I try to do.
SHANE:
Excellent. And, Aaron, let me ask you this. I know one of the things you do as well, besides Video Death Loop, is improv. You’re a member of the 25 year history of the award-winning Einstein Simplified improv troupe in Knoxville, Tennessee. And, I know that COVID has wrecked your all’s performance schedules for this year, so what are you doing...are you trying to do anything...besides Video Death Loop...improv-wise to keep your sanity going?
AARON:
Ah, boy. No.
SHANE:
Sorry.
AARON:
I wish I had a more interesting answer than that. But honestly, Video Death Loop, as much as comedy goes has pretty much been my everything this year. I think we got in a couple of months of shows, Einstein Simplified did, at the beginning of the year. I think maybe February. Maybe eight shows? Eight or ten shows, something like that? And we have not been back since and it has been pretty tough. We tried to pick up our podcast, but it’s really tough. One of the great things about doing a podcast with John is that we both have some level of audio recording and editing expertise. So, it’s just like, “John, get yourself ready, we’re going to do a podcast.” “Ok, you get yourself ready, Aaron, we’re going to do a podcast.” We both can kind of trust each other. It’s not really the same there, so it was very difficult to keep the podcast going and not really what we all wanted to do. I enjoy performing on stage. I love doing podcasts, but there’s also a part of me that really loves performing on stage. There’s something about the idea of doing improv, that I walk in, I have not practiced, I have not rehearsed and it is the act of creation as the final product and it’s amazing to me. There’s no editing. Shane, I know this podcast you’re getting going, you are going to be spending so much time on this content. Like five or six times as much recording and editing than people will listen to it. And that’s great and it’s fun and I do that, too, but I just love being on stage doing improv. And it’s just not the same on the Internets. So I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that we’re going to be able to perform again live soon.
SHANE:
I hope so.
AARON:
Of course I have a couple of other things, if you are interested on the Internet, if you need a daily reminder of your mortality you can go to The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day which is a blog I started almost ten years ago at this point which posts the same picture of Dave Coulier every day. It is what is on the tin. That’s all it is.
SHANE:
It is...I love it, because...and I don’t know why…
AARON and JOHN:
(laughter)
JOHN:
That is perfect.
SHANE:
Every so often I will just go and check in on it and realize, “Oh, this is the same picture I saw a year ago.” And, I’m glad it’s there.
AARON:
I do think that people that are engaging with it on Tumblr, which is the platform it’s on...and I know there are several different The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day, but the Tumblr one is the original. It’s the one I created. The other ones are ones that were inspired by mine and I love them, I think they’re great. I’m not trying to poo poo on them, but the one I run is on Tumblr and I developed the idea. And, the people that are engaging with it where they go to Tumblr as a primary social media that they use and they see that picture...I have seen sort of an uptick of people that have found it this year to be especially very...I don’t know...centering in a way and I get that from time to time.
JOHN:
It’s constant.
AARON:
It’s not as much comedy as it is a...it’s...you know…”Dave Coulier is going to be there smiling in that stupid sweater in the middle of the pandemic and he’s going to be there smiling in that stupid sweater when the pandemic is wiped out by our vaccines. And then he’ll be doing the same later on, as well.”
And there’s something very nice about that for me and for the people that follow it.
SHANE:
I get that.
AARON:
I’m just humbled to be a part of what that’s been for people.
SHANE:
That is amazing. And it’s another great example-- I’m sorry for interrupting-- but I think that’s another great example of taking a short little thing and making something quite large out of it. You took a photo of Dave Coulier and what are we at now? Thirty-six hundred times you’ve posted it?
AARON:
Yeah, close. Very close.
JOHN:
I think one of the things that makes it feel especially real is that I know for a fact that Aaron makes… he handcrafts every post. He makes everything happen. There’s no bot happening there to make that happen. In fact, I know there’s a couple of times where he’s panicked where he couldn’t get to it almost in time.
AARON:
Yeah. No, no. There’s been days where it’s gone up at 10 pm. I’m like, “Oh, God!”
SHANE:
Wait. Wait a minute. I did not know this part. I assumed it was a bot.
AARON:
No!
SHANE:
Are you telling me that you physically post this photo once a day?
AARON:
Yeah. Well. Ok. So, I make every post. Tumblr does allow you to queue posts, which is where you can make a few and essentially let them spool out at an interval that you determine.
So, early on I was doing the posting every day individually. But then I started seeing the reaction and I realized that it was probably more important to people… I had to…
There’s a point where it went from a goofy joke to where I had to sit down and think about the philosophical aspects of what this was and how it was interacting with people and did I have some kind of moral obligation to people? And what it was.
So, I decided that some of the consistency was very important. And that was consistency in posting time. And I’m a human. I cannot always post that picture at 8:30 am. I would love to be able to do it, but it’s just not humanly possible for me. So, I queue things up so they can post. I only do a few at a time. I don’t want to set it and forget it forever.
Yeah. It’s definitely not a bot. It will… when I die, there will be a few that post after I die and then it will stop.
SHANE:
That’s disturbing.
AARON:
It’s very much relying on me being alive.
SHANE:
I don’t know if that makes this funnier or scarier.
JOHN:
If Aaron stops posting on there, call the cops.
AARON:
Exactly. It’s my dead man switch. That the point when you know, John, that you’ve got to send that hard drive to the Washington Post.
JOHN:
They’re gonna get a hard drive and it’s just going to be nothing but a bunch of pictures of Dave Coulier.
AARON:
It’s fun! It’s so good!
JOHN:
They’ll be like, “I don’t know what we can do with this.” They’re different images. They’re not the same.
AARON:
But, yeah. So is it. That is a promise. That is what The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day is, it’s a promise from me to the world that I will post this picture and you can react to it however you want to. And that’s all it is.
But if you want to give me two dollars and 99 cents, I do have an e-book that’s available.
SHANE:
Oh! Excellent.
AARON:
Dave Coulier is free. But, it’s called Fat Riker. It’s been out for a couple of years at this point. It’s about a band. It’s inspired somewhat by Einstein Simplified, somewhat by friend groups I’ve been parts of. John was actually in the original band Fat Riker for some amount of time. He may still be in it. I don’t know.
JOHN:
Who knows at this point?
AARON:
It was sort of an in-joke that I decided to write an entire book about. I’m still proud of that book. It’s available on Amazon or pretty much anywhere you want to go get an e-book at. Fat Riker by Aaron Littleton.
JOHN:
I made a whole album that’s based on the track-- there’s one whole chapter that’s just a bunch of track listings with times on them and I made the songs as part of a review and I didn’t release it to anyone but Aaron.
AARON:
It’s very weird.
JOHN:
Yeah. That’s my Wu-Tang album.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
I want to thank John Hurst and Aaron Littleton for taking the time to talk with me about comedy and the Lumière brothers film and for teaching me a little about the thought process behind their comedy. You can find links to the Video Death Loop podcast, Doc Isaac’s Bandcamp page, the Same Picture of Dave Coulier and more in the episode’s show notes.
I know it seems like we’ve spent an insane amount of time today talking about a 40-second film. But, I hope you’ll agree that it was time well spent.
I went digging around recently on the Find A Grave website and learned that our gardening friend, François Clerc died on Halloween, October 31, 1952, at the age of 84, 57 years after gamely agreeing to getting sprayed in the face for our amusement. I wonder if he knew, or if the world remembered at the time of his death, that he was not only a gardener, but the world’s first comedy film star?
I was glad to also find some answers to those questions I’d had about the Lumière brothers and what made L’Arroseur arrose seem so special in their world. Unsurprisingly, the answers turned out to be quite logical.
They remade the film two more times because the original negative kept getting damaged in the duplication process. A reminder of the fragility of these early films, but also maybe an indication of the popularity of this particular film with the public.
The film was featured on the original exhibition poster because it had generated the largest audience response at earlier smaller showings. So, maybe the idea of marketing a film based on focus group responses isn’t as new as we think.
The Lumière brothers were able to circle the globe with their new invention because it was so convenient to use for one person who could record, develop, and exhibit a film with a single device. This allowed the Lumière company to send out an army of young adventurous men to far-flung places with the dual mission of creating content to sell with the new projectors and to introduce the new devices to audiences in as many countries as possible in a race against Thomas Edison for corporate dominance. The convenience of their device made it possible for people in most countries of the world to have seen a film in just two or three years after that historic showing on December 28, 1895. In today’s terms, it was truly a viral sensation and it changed the way we look at the world forever.
And, I finally had an answer to the question of why the Lumière brothers seemed to walk away from the business of movie making almost as quickly as they helped invent it. And, it was an answer that would make even the most successful movie producer of today green with envy-- they simply didn’t need the money.
But I did learn that they continued to invent new technologies and even new film technologies such as innovations in 3-D movies and color film.
But, as to why this short movie is important to us today in comedy is probably also a deceptively simple answer. It’s not the content of the film at all, but how it was watched. For the first time, a group of people could watch a movie together instead of an individual experience through Edison’s kinetoscope. And, if you’ve ever experienced the joy of laughing with a roomful of strangers at a funny moment in a movie theater, then you know how amazing and joyful that all feels. The Lumière brothers didn’t invent comedy, but in a way they did invent the communal nature of watching a film. The cinematograph made it possible for us to gasp, to laugh, to cry, to shriek in horror together as moving images told us a story. Without that sense of community, it wouldn’t even be possible perhaps to have an improbably long conversation about a 40-second film.
Like you, I look forward to the day we can laugh together in a darkened theater again and feel just a little more human, even if it’s just something as silly as watching a gardener get a hoseful of water sprayed onto his face.
In the meantime, let’s make a plan to come back here next week and learn more about the people who act funny for a living.
Once again, I want to thank the guests for this episode. Martin Barnier, professor of film studies at the University Lumière Lyon 2, and John Hurst and Aaron Littleton of the Video Death Loop podcast.
You will find links relating to all of my guests and various projects we discussed in the show notes for the 1895 episode. Visit the extras section of ActingFunnyPodcast.com and you’ll find a listing of movies mentioned in this episode, as well as links to information about books and other media also referenced today.
Thanks also to the Offbeat Agent, Matt Ward, for sponsoring today’s episode. Visit him on Instagram at offbeatagent.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Acting Funny, the podcast that takes comedy films seriously. This episode was written and produced by me, Shane Rhyne. The theme music was written and performed by Saint Thomas LeDoux. Additional music for this episode included the Newsreel March by Ikonikmusik, the Paris Belle Epoque Cafe by bluepanda, and film projector sound effects by Daniel Simon. The show’s logo was designed by Andy Forrester. Social media and communications are managed by Shane Rhyne and Tamara Rhyne. You can find links for these people on the show’s credits page at actingfunnypodcast.com.