While many of the cinematic examples of the fascination with operationality have a comic element to them, it was in the plethora of mischief films produced over the years 1896 –1905 that cinematic comedy really got underway. It is in them that narrative, gag and mechanism became three distinctive means of ordering the temporal process in a way that was distinctively cinematic. [Tom] Gunning identifies these three components of the operational aesthetic in his analysis of L’Arroseur arrosé (1895), a film often cited as the first piece of cinematic comedy. A basic narrative structure is formed by the construction of the gag, a gag that is itself constructed on the basis of the deployment and redeployment of an apparatus. A man attempting to water his garden is prevented from doing so by a boy stepping on the hose. When the man examines the nozzle to see what is wrong with it, the boy steps off the hose so that water suddenly spurts in the man’s face. The man reprimands the boy and finally chases him out of frame with the hose. The narrative emerges from the apparatus mediating between the two characters and inscribing action with temporal development in the operation of the device. The gag, Gunning quite rightly suggests, emerges from the deployment of an apparatus which creates a detour of character action through an inanimate object, and of course from the man, initially oblivious to the boy’s intervention, being caught unawares.