Editing Mitchell and Kenyon (section)

===Comedy ===
As early as 1900 some fiction films included slapstick comedy with blundering policemen, in anticipation of the [[Keystone Cops]] and [[Charlie Chaplin]] more than a decade later. ''Diving Lucy'' of 1903 showed a lady's legs sticking up out of a pond in Blackburn's Queen's Park, and rescuers setting up a plank which a tubby policeman goes out on only to find it a hoax, at which the others let go and he falls in the water. It was an international success, in France and the U.S. where it was billed as "the hit British comedy of the year".

To enliven some street scenes the showmen arranged for mock fights or hosing down a spectator, and slapstick was added to park scenes with male actors dressed as women falling off a donkey or in the water from a boat, revealing their petticoats under the long skirts of the time.