Visual Gag - History

History

There are numerous examples in cinema history of directors who based most of the humor in their films on visual gags, even to the point of using no or minimal dialogue. Visual gags began in live theater. The first known use of a visual gag in a film was in the Lumière brothers' 1895 short, L'Arroseur Arrosé ("The Waterer Watered"), in which a gardener watering his plants becomes the subject of a boy's prank. An early pioneer in visual gags was Georges Méliès. The filmmaker experimented with techniques in the then-new film media creating techniques to trick viewers.

Vaudeville actors often used gags in their routines. A classic vaudeville visual gag was for two actors to mirror each other's actions around a prop. Visual gags were continued into Silent films and are considered a hallmark of the genre. In silent films, the actors in the mirror bit performed in silence with no music playing. Comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Marx Brothers often used visual humour because the technology used to record voices in film did not yet exist. Often the differences between people are part of the comic duos, especially thin and fat actors are used such as Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy.

The New York Times cites the fourth Gilligan's Island episode "Goodnight, Sweet Skipper" as a classic American sight gag. The castaways were trying to contact civilization with a radio. In the episode, Skipper can recall only how he converted the radio into a transmitter in World War II when he is sleepwalking. After Skipper was unsuccessful, Gilligan got it to work by pounding on the radio; he used it to briefly contact a pilot flying overhead. Gilligan retrieved Skipper and demonstrated how he pounded on the radio, causing the guts of the radio to fall out. Their rescue was foiled.