Here we have Jean Durand directing a comedy short for Gaumont -- Quel supris! This time, it's Lucien Bataille starring as Zigoto, wearing the ill-assorted and badly fitting costume of of the slapstick comedian. He finds his friend the plumber crying because he can't handle all the work he has coming in, and here's a ritzy apartment where they have a gas leak. Bataille, who will do anything for a pal if it involves him swinging a pickaxe indoors, offers to do his best which, as it turns out, is not very good.
It's raw, destructive slapstick, not quite as bone-breaking as the Italian variety, but still destructive enough to make you think that Mack Sennett and his bunch at Keystone, who would be let loose the following year, were a bunch of pantywaists (comme un dit les poules mouillées), if not the wholesale carnage that you got in the Italian versions. Bataille was popular. He left for Pathe, where he was known as 'Casimir' and managed to keep the monicker when he moved again to Eclair.