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3I Love Lucy
Television and Gender in
Postwar Domestic Ideology
LORI LANDAY
“Lu--cy! You’ve got some ’splainin’ to do!” Ricky Ricardo exclaims, demand-
ing an explanation for yet another of Lucy’s tricky schemes to get into the
act, make money, outdo the “girls” in her women’s club, or in some other
way escape being just a housewife. I Love Lucy ran Monday nights on CBS
as a half-hour situation comedy from October 1951 to May 1957 and as
monthly, hour-long specials from November 1957 until April 1960. It is
the show in which the conventions, structure, and style of the sitcom genre
were codified, and it might well be the most popular situation comedy
ever. Of course, the genre of the television sitcom has antecedents, and
I Love Lucy was based not only on conventions of comedy established in
romantic comedy, vaudeville, film, radio, and the earliest television shows in
general but also reworked material from Ball’s hit radio show, My Favorite
Husband. I Love Lucy was innovative, however, in both its sense of the situ-
ation and the comedy; the situation was based in a comic tension between
everyday life and comic exaggeration, and the comedy was based on the
unrivaled comedic talents of Lucille Ball and the excellent supporting cast.
At its height, I Love Lucy redefined what it meant for a television show to
be popular, being the first television show to be seen in over ten million
American homes and setting many new ratings records. Not only did the
show help develop the situation comedy into a genre, it contributed to the
construction of postwar domestic ideology.
31
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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32 | Lori Landay
I Love Lucy could be this influential because it was created when tele-
vision was inventing itself and its place in American culture. Recorded on
black-and-white 35mm film before a live studio audience, edited, and then
broadcast, the show set the standard for television aesthetics; the flat lighting
style invented by legendary cinematographer Karl Freund gave depth and
realism to the studio sets. Stylistically, the show set a new standard for the
broadcast audiovisual medium by incorporating key aspects of both radio
and film—a live studio audience and continuity editing, respectively. The
live studio audience enabled the actors to play off and to their audience
and helped blur the boundaries between the worlds of the home and the
television screen. Viewers at home laughed along with the unseen studio
audience. The editing between shots captured with three cameras running
simultaneously facilitated the style of classical Hollywood cinema, estab-
lishing intimacy and identification through use of the close-up.1 Moreover,
when these spectatorial practices of classical Hollywood cinema were com-
bined with the domestic exhibition of television, the sense of intimacy
and closeness was even more pronounced. The medium of television had
an immediacy and sense of presence that far outstripped radio and film.
Whether live or, like I Love Lucy, filmed “live,” the discursive patterns of
early television encouraged viewers to feel as if they were actually present
at the event or performance. As the 1946 book Here Is Television, Your
Window on the World suggests, founding discourses represented television
as both transparent and magical in that it not only extended the home but
brought the world into the family living room.
The genre of situation comedy was at a crucial stage in its develop-
ment. I Love Lucy and My Favorite Husband producer and writer Jess Oppen-
heimer explained that he and writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr. had
broken new ground with their radio sitcom: “We just weren’t writing what
was then considered the ‘in’ kind of radio comedy show, where you have a
series of comedy characters, each of whom comes in, does his own shtick,
and then exits. Instead, we did whole stories—situation comedy” (127–28).
Indeed, each episode of I Love Lucy has a rational setup, and the emphasis
on storytelling rather than shtick focused the show’s content on cultural
discourses of home and family life. The situation of I Love Lucy was the
domestic life of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, who were not stars but ordinary
people (although in later seasons Ricky’s career takes the gang to Hollywood
and Europe). When the writers wrote the initial scripts for the series, they
based the everyday details of the Ricardo marriage on the Arnaz’s marriage,
and many scenes set in the Ricardo bedroom as the characters wake up,
get dressed, or get ready for bed have an intimacy that is grounded in the
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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I Love Lucy | 33
mundane details of everyday life and in the audience’s knowledge that the
actors were really married.
In portraying everyday domesticity grounded in realism, I Love Lucy
brought a representation of home life into American homes at a time when
many families were buying televisions and working out their own versions
of domestic life. After World War II, Americans were, to use Elaine Tyler
May’s phrase, “homeward bound,” both moving toward domesticity and also
restrained by domesticity. The boundaries between home and the world,
long a demarcater of gender, were in flux. The ideology of domesticity—
an idealization of marriage, family, and the home prescribed, albeit differ-
ently, to both men and women—was an inherently unstable one (like the
other postwar ideologies of containment) that tried to legitimate traditional
Figure 3.1. Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo and Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo in I Love
Lucy. 1951–1961. Photo courtesy of Movie Star NewsFair.
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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34 | Lori Landay
definitions of gender and the separation of spheres at a time when those
divisions were breaking down. At the core of the ideological construct of
femininity in the postwar era were women’s roles as housewives. High mar-
riage rates, the explosion of suburban housing, the baby boom, emphasis
on traditional gender roles, and a renewed belief in the importance of the
home all bolstered a domestic revival in the 1950s. This revival informed
the cultural context in which I Love Lucy struck such a chord, though with
a twist that evolved from the real lives of Ball and Arnaz.
The origin of the series would have been well known to most television
watchers, because it was repeated relentlessly in the popular publications
of the time—Life, Newsweek, Time, Look—women’s magazines, and daily
newspapers. The series originated in Ball and Arnaz’s desire to work together
so they could stop the work-caused separations that had characterized their
marriage. CBS was interested in making a television version of Ball’s radio
show, My Favorite Husband, but balked at the idea of casting Arnaz as the
husband because his Cuban ethnicity did not fit into the successful formula
centered on the radio show’s Midwestern family. Ball and Arnaz took mat-
ters into their own hands with a vaudeville tour intended to prove to CBS
that they could find and please an audience.
The pilot and then the series kept the dizzy housewife character and the
older couple foils relatively intact, but it changed the setting to New York and
the husband’s profession from banker to bandleader. In shifting the situation
from middle-class domesticity to the world of show business, I Love Lucy
tapped into the television trend of stars playing versions of themselves (George
Burns and Gracie Allen; Ozzie and Harriett Nelson) and enabled musical
numbers to be performed. The pilot centered on Larry Lopez, a bandleader
who wanted as normal life as possible, and his wacky wife, Lucy, who wanted
to get into show business. In the pilot, Larry laments, “I want a wife who’s
just a wife.” And, so a major conflict of I Love Lucy was articulated: the dis-
satisfied housewife eager to escape the home versus the world-weary husband
who wants his wife to provide him the comforts of home—characters clearly
not based on Ball and Arnaz’s real-life image or experience, although perhaps
on some fantasy of the domestic bliss that postwar discourses promised would
come from a conventional home life based on polarized gender roles.
How typical was the restlessness and frustration that Lucy embodied?
According to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, “the problem that has
no name” was unspoken yet widespread, and the comic treatment of women’s
desires for a life outside the home is more a precursor of 1960s–70s femi-
nism than typical of the 1950s. It might be that Ball and Arnaz (and their
writers) were continuing to perform the cultural work suggested by a 1938
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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I Love Lucy | 35
Photoplay magazine poll of Hollywood stars, which found that 93 percent of
female stars and 78 percent of male stars believed in women having careers
after marriage in contrast to the general population that disapproved of wives
having jobs (May 41). I Love Lucy gives us both the actors’ vanguard per-
spective, which obviously Ball and Arnaz shared, and the more conventional
perspective of the population at large, which the show mimicked. Ball and
Arnaz and the writers, including Madelyn Pugh, one of very few women
television writers, based their work on their experiences as gendered people
in the postwar era; they were surrounded by the domestic revival sweeping
America, yet separate from it as part of Hollywood’s more egalitarian culture.
Seen in this light, I Love Lucy resonated so loudly in the early 1950s
because the show suggested the failure of the domestic ideal—based on the
rigid gender roles portrayed in popular culture to match up with people’s
real experiences of everyday life. The gap between domestic ideology and
social experience was larger in the 1950s than in the earlier half of the
twentieth century. Historian William Chafe summarizes some evidence to
support this: “The poll data showed that most citizens preferred to retain
traditional definitions of masculine and feminine spheres, even while modi-
fying the content of those spheres in practice” (171). When Lucille Ball is
quoted as saying, “I’m just a typical housewife at heart” in an article on
“America’s top saleswomen,” she is indeed holding a traditional definition
of femininity while in practice having an unconventional career by excelling
in the physical comedy that had been the province of men.
Of course, I Love Lucy was not a social realist critique of gender
roles—it was comedy. But, comedy in American culture in general, and in
television sitcoms in particular, is a major forum for reflecting and shap-
ing cultural ideals; it is a testing ground for social formations from the
simplest performance of mannerisms to the situation that gives the comedy
its premise. In order for a sitcom to be popular, it does not have to depict
how life really is, but it does have to portray a life that the audience likes.
Audiences not only liked I Love Lucy, they loved it, and they embraced
not only the series but a range of Lucy and Ricky commodities, includ-
ing his and hers matching pajamas, jewelry, nursery sets, aprons, smoking
jackets, dolls, diaper bags, and furniture for every room. As Ball explains
in her autobiography, “It was possible to furnish a house and dress a whole
family with items carrying our I Love Lucy label” (224). One ad proclaim-
ing “Live Like Lucy!” indicates how television brought the world into the
home and the home into the world with commodities. Clearly the vision of
domesticity enacted in the Ricardo’s apartment was, for Lucy, a commodified
one with many episodes centering on the struggle to get the money to buy
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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36 | Lori Landay
something for herself or the home, perhaps most hilariously exemplified in
the episode “The Freezer.” Although Ball and Arnaz were in a far-different
financial situation from the Ricardos, or most of their middle-class viewers,
the show’s emphasis on love—on emotions, marriage, friendship, and the
pleasures of domestic life—outweighed the dissonance between Ball-Arnaz
and the Ricardos. At no point was this more apparent than when the off-
screen and on-screen lives of Ball and Arnaz were at their closest—when
the writers worked Ball’s real-life pregnancy into the show by making Lucy
Ricardo pregnant, too.
On January 19, 1953, two babies were born—in the morning, Ball and
Arnaz had a son, and in the evening, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo also had a son.
“Lucy Goes to the Hospital” hit an all-time high rating, with an estimate
of more than 44 million viewers. In blurring the line between reality and
artifice with the synchronic “real-life” and “fictional” births, I Love Lucy was
a metaphor for what television as an institution and apparatus was doing
anyway: making more permeable the traditional demarcations between pub-
lic and private, truth and artifice, and representation and social experience.
The seven pregnancy shows, culminating in “Lucy Goes to the Hos-
pital” (which barely had Lucy in it at all) built on the previous season and
a half when I Love Lucy established itself as a phenomenon. Many of the
most brilliant episodes are from this early period, including “Job Switch-
ing” with the hilarious candy factory conveyor belt scene and “Lucy Does
a TV Commercial” with the Vitameatavegamin scene. These episodes and
many more lesser-known ones followed the successful formula of building
up to comic climaxes that showcased the comedic talents of Ball and her
co-stars. New York Times Magazine writer Jack Gould explained the appeal
in March 1953:
“I Love Lucy” is as much a phenomenon as an attraction. Fun-
damentally, it is a piece of hilarious theatre put together with
deceptively brilliant know-how, but it also is many other things.
In part it is a fusion of the make-believe of the footlights and
the real-life existence of a glamorous “name.” In part it is the
product of inspired press agentry which has made a national
legend of a couple which two years ago was on the Hollywood
side-lines. (16)
The “inspired” publicity machine to which Gould refers was indeed indus-
trious and effective. By February 1952, just four months after I Love Lucy
premiered, the show was not only number one but also hit all the major
newspapers and magazines, making connections between the real-life actors
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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I Love Lucy | 37
and their on-screen characters and intertwining their personal and profes-
sional stories.
Of the hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and features that
I have researched, hardly any stray from the Desilu publicity machine’s story
of how television saved their marriage. The story goes like this: After their
1940 marriage, they were so busy with their careers that they barely saw each
other, and they tried to find a vehicle in which they could work together.
Even though producers would not develop projects for them because of
Arnaz’s Cuban ethnicity and strong accent, Ball and Arnaz were convinced
they could be a success. The vaudeville act they took on the road was well
received, but they canceled the second half because of 39-year-old Ball’s
pregnancy. That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, but soon she was preg-
nant again, and they filmed the pilot episode when she was six months
pregnant. CBS and sponsor cigarette company Philip Morris picked up
the show, and they began production one month after their daughter Lucie
was born. The innovations of the production context figure largely in the
articles—that Ball and Arnaz owned the show through their company Desilu
Productions and filmed it before a live audience in Hollywood—but the
articles always stress the love story. As a March 1952 Chicago Sunday Tribune
article put it, “Desi and Lucille are particularly grateful to TV because it
has given them an opportunity to live a normal family life.” An April 6,
1952, L.A. Examiner article ran a picture of the couple smooching in bed
with the caption, “When Desi and Lucille do scenes like this in their TV
show, they aren’t just play-acting—they really mean it.” Or as “a friend” of
Ball’s explained in a July 1952 Look article, “The trouble with Lucy is that
her real life is so much like her reel life” (Silvian 7).
Of course, despite the PR copy that the show was based on the
Ball and Arnaz marriage, clearly it was not. In particular, the divergence
between talented, successful, and famous Lucille Ball and thwarted, unful-
filled, unknown Lucy Ricardo is huge, and although the actors had a daugh-
ter, the Ricardos were childless. But, it allowed Ball and Arnaz a bizarre
public fantasy of a private life closer to traditional gender roles than their
real-life partnership.
The situation of I Love Lucy articulated the contradictions of mar-
riage, gender, the battle of the sexes, and middle-class life—concerns of
the majority of television watchers and buyers. Ball attributed the series’
success to identification:
We had a great identification with millions of people. People
identified with the Ricardos because we had the same problems
they had. Desi and I weren’t your ordinary Hollywood couple on
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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38 | Lori Landay
TV. We lived in a brownstone apartment somewhere in Manhat-
tan, and paying the rent, getting a new dress, getting a stale fur
collar on an old cloth coat, or buying a piece of furniture were
all worth a story. (qtd. in Andrews 225–26)
Note that the things Ball lists as ordinary problems all deal with domestic,
private life; the problem solving leads back to the core of the show, the
“love” between the couple. The actors’ collaborative marriage filters through
the comic representation of the demands of the companionate marriage,
the postwar ideal that imagined the husband and wife as a team support-
ing the husband’s work in the public sphere with the wife stationed in the
private sphere.
This aspect of the conflation of Ball-Arnaz and the Ricardos emerged
even more when the show incorporated Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy into
the fictional world of the series. When Ball and Arnaz revealed her pregnan-
cy to the show’s producer, they transformed what could have been the end
of the series into a new arena for comedy; not only had television “saved”
their marriage, but it enabled Ball to maintain her career and have a family.
Moreover, Ball performed the cultural work of a trickster in mainstream
America by being the first openly pregnant woman to perform on television,
which challenged accepted ideas about the impropriety of public representa-
tions of pregnancy. For example, even though the censors would not allow
anyone to say the word “pregnant” on the show (the French “enceinte” was
used instead), Arnaz refused when Philip Morris wanted Lucy’s pregnant
body hidden behind furniture. Instead of hiding Ball’s pregnancy, they made
comedy from Lucy’s cravings and mood swings, aspirations for the baby’s
future, Ricky’s sympathetic morning sickness and important role as father,
and cute maternity clothes (available at a store near you).
The intertwining of fictionality and “reality” in the pregnancy episodes
resulted in an emotional intensity that allowed the viewer to participate
in a highly mediated but nevertheless moving enactment of expecting a
baby. Throughout these reality-based episodes, the audience is privy to a
re-enactment of personal events, or rather, Ball and Arnaz turned their pri-
vate experience into a public representation that reflected and shaped the
popular pursuit of marriage and family.
The episode in which Lucy tells Ricky she is expecting was fore-
shadowed by media coverage of Ball’s pregnancy and reports that the baby
would be incorporated into the show. In the episode, Lucy tries to tell
Ricky the news, things interfere, and the dramatic irony builds because
the viewer knows what Ricky does not. The climax of the show occurs in
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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I Love Lucy | 39
Ricky’s nightclub—and Ball and Arnaz were understandably emotional as
they filmed the scene. Ricky gets an anonymous note that a woman wants
to tell her husband they are expecting a “blessed event,” and Ricky goes
from table to table looking for the couple as he sings “Rockabye Baby.” He
finally comes to a table where Lucy is seated. After an emotional moment of
realization, Ricky sings “We’re Having a Baby” as he walks around the stage
with a tearful Lucy, and he flubs the lyrics of the song. The episode ends
with a close-up of the couple crying and laughing. Producer Oppenheimer
recalls that they did another take, filming a more upbeat scene as had been
originally scripted, but they decided to use the first one.
This moment is significant because it is Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz we
are watching, not the characters. The fiction of the television series becomes,
for a moment, transparent. Most striking, however, is the intimacy of this
scene, a familiarity felt by the audience for the people on the screen that
had been forged in a television series that revolved around the intimate
moments of marriage and everyday life. In order for the creative team to
choose the take in which the actors are choked up and have it work, there
had to have been a long setup to this moment paved with a hybrid of
fictionality and reality that transcends both.
The scene itself plays with the line between reality and artifice and
between public and private. As Ricky goes from table to table in search of
the parents-to-be, the camera is positioned in the audience, encouraging our
identification as a live audience member (reinforced by the laughter of the
studio audience that blurs with the diegetic laughter of the club audience).
The mise-en-scène of the nightclub stage and incorporation of musical per-
formance into the plot is typical of how early television oscillated between
domestic and theatrical space in shows such as The George Burns and Gracie
Allen Show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Make Room for Daddy,
as well as I Love Lucy. As Lynn Spigel explains, “By acknowledging its own
artifice and theatricality, the family comedy encouraged viewers to feel as if
they had been let in on a joke, while at the same time allowing them to
take that joke seriously” (Make Room 165). The strategy of letting the audi-
ence in on both the joke and the seriousness runs through the pregnancy
episodes and makes comedy out of reality—including Ball’s pregnant body
and what it could and could not do. Although there is not a great deal of
Ball’s trademark physical comedy in the episodes filmed while she was six
and seven months pregnant, there are scattered moments. Not only is Ball
a pregnant woman seen in public and continuing to work, but also in the
scenes that showcase her pregnant body, Lucy is competent and resourceful
in getting around its limitations.
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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40 | Lori Landay
The convergence of reality and fictionality suggested by Ball’s physi-
cal comedy peaked on January 19, 1953, when the two babies were born.
The Newsweek cover story of the same date, “Desilu Formula for Top TV:
Brains, Beauty, Now a Baby,” describes the schedule of the blessed events,
“If all goes well, newspaper readers all over the country will be treated on
Jan. 20 to the story of Mrs. Arnaz having a baby—the morning after they
see Mrs. Ricardo go to the hospital on TV. All this may come under the
heading of how duplicated in life and television can you get” (56). Because
no one knew the sex of the Ball-Arnaz baby, they could not duplicate that
piece of reality for the November filming of the episode “Lucy Goes to
the Hospital,” and it was kept secret that the Ricardo baby would be a
boy. The pregnancy episodes play on this uncertainty, and the sex became
a topic of popular speculation, culminating in the dual births. Examples
of the headlines reporting the births foreground the collision of reality
and fictionality—with fictionality winning out over reality: “Lucy Sticks to
Script: A Boy It Is!” (NY Daily Mirror, 1/20/53); “TV Was Right: a Boy for
Lucille” (Daily News, 1/20/53); “What the Script Ordered” (Life, 2/2/53).
Unlike the celebratory melding of real-life and fiction in the babies,
other real-life events were kept carefully away from the television text.
Although I Love Lucy was subversive about domestic containment, Ball,
Arnaz, the producers, and CBS downplayed the Red Scare accusation that
Lucille Ball was a Communist. A full discussion of the media representations
of how Ball had, in fact, registered as a Communist in 1938 in order, she
insisted, to please her grandfather, is beyond the scope of this chapter, but
Ball’s red hair almost had a very different—and career-ending—connotation.
The news of Ball’s 1953 hearings before the House Un-American Activities
Committee leaked out, leading to a Los Angeles-Herald Express headline,
in three-inch red letters: “LUCILLE BALL NAMED RED.” That night,
before the filming of the 1953–54 season premiere, Arnaz gave a serious
speech denouncing communism and labeling the rumors lies. The crowd
cheered. He ended as he always did, with, “And now, I want you to meet
my favorite wife,” but then he continued, “my favorite redhead—in fact,
that’s the only thing red about her, and even that’s not legitimate—Lucille
Ball!” (Sanders and Gilbert 81) Not surprisingly, the television series also
eschewed the real-life unrest in the Ball-Arnaz marriage, which ended in
divorce in 1960, about when the series ended. It seems that television could
not really save their, or anyone’s, marriage.
“There’s no dream she wouldn’t reach for, and no fall she wouldn’t
take.” This is how Walter Matthau described the universal appeal and come-
dic genius of Lucille Ball, and indeed Lucille Ball’s comic genius continues
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
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I Love Lucy | 41
to entertain and amaze in its embrace of both hopeful aspiration and often
subsequent plummet (Sanders and Gilbert 368). In the role of Lucy, Ball
and her collaborators created one of the most beloved and central kinds
of cultural figures: a trickster, a subversive, paradoxical fantasy figure who
does what we cannot or dare not by moving between social spaces, roles,
and categories that the culture has deemed oppositional (Landay Trickster).
When faced with a situation that appears to have only two choices, the
trickster is the kind of hero/ine who creates a third possibility. But, the
trickster’s schemes often backfire, and then the trickster becomes the dupe.
Lucy is specifically a female trickster because her attempts to circumvent
the limitations of postwar domesticity oscillate between “masculine” and
“feminine” social roles, spaces, practices, and metaphors.
By calling attention to the power relations of the sexes in everyday
domestic life, I Love Lucy participated in a proto-feminist current build-
ing in American culture. The continued appeal of I Love Lucy in reruns is
due not only to comic brilliance but also to how it offers contemporary
audiences a fitting precursor to the women’s movement of the 1960s–70s.
Scholar George Lipsitz’s term “memory as misappropriation” suggests a show
can be popular because it represents the past as people wish it had been. I
Love Lucy recasts the domestic prison of the 1950s into the easily escapable
terrain of the female trickster. Lucy’s daring pursuit of her desires and her
irrepressible insistence that Ricky—and everyone else—acknowledge her as
a talented individual provide a model that may be radically different from
our impressions of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.
Moreover, by wiggling under, vaulting over, and sneaking past the boundary
between reality and fictionality, by playing fast and loose with the various
windows between the world and the home that television promised and
failed to be, Lucy the trickster delighted postwar Americans, and I Love
Lucy shaped situation comedy forever.
NOTES
Thanks to my husband, Richard Cownie, for editing help, as well as for
seeing the humor in things.
1. Despite the myth it started, Desilu did not invent the three-camera
system still used in television today. Arnaz and cinematographer Karl Freund (who
shot the German expressionist Metropolis in 1926 and was Ball’s cinematographer
on the 1943 MGM musical DuBarry Was a Lady) adapted the system pioneered by
Jerry Fairbanks but kept all three cameras rolling simultaneously. See Christopher
Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties, 53–56 and 65–68.
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
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The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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Television and Gender in
Postwar Domestic Ideology
LORI LANDAY
“Lu--cy! You’ve got some ’splainin’ to do!” Ricky Ricardo exclaims, demand-
ing an explanation for yet another of Lucy’s tricky schemes to get into the
act, make money, outdo the “girls” in her women’s club, or in some other
way escape being just a housewife. I Love Lucy ran Monday nights on CBS
as a half-hour situation comedy from October 1951 to May 1957 and as
monthly, hour-long specials from November 1957 until April 1960. It is
the show in which the conventions, structure, and style of the sitcom genre
were codified, and it might well be the most popular situation comedy
ever. Of course, the genre of the television sitcom has antecedents, and
I Love Lucy was based not only on conventions of comedy established in
romantic comedy, vaudeville, film, radio, and the earliest television shows in
general but also reworked material from Ball’s hit radio show, My Favorite
Husband. I Love Lucy was innovative, however, in both its sense of the situ-
ation and the comedy; the situation was based in a comic tension between
everyday life and comic exaggeration, and the comedy was based on the
unrivaled comedic talents of Lucille Ball and the excellent supporting cast.
At its height, I Love Lucy redefined what it meant for a television show to
be popular, being the first television show to be seen in over ten million
American homes and setting many new ratings records. Not only did the
show help develop the situation comedy into a genre, it contributed to the
construction of postwar domestic ideology.
31
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32 | Lori Landay
I Love Lucy could be this influential because it was created when tele-
vision was inventing itself and its place in American culture. Recorded on
black-and-white 35mm film before a live studio audience, edited, and then
broadcast, the show set the standard for television aesthetics; the flat lighting
style invented by legendary cinematographer Karl Freund gave depth and
realism to the studio sets. Stylistically, the show set a new standard for the
broadcast audiovisual medium by incorporating key aspects of both radio
and film—a live studio audience and continuity editing, respectively. The
live studio audience enabled the actors to play off and to their audience
and helped blur the boundaries between the worlds of the home and the
television screen. Viewers at home laughed along with the unseen studio
audience. The editing between shots captured with three cameras running
simultaneously facilitated the style of classical Hollywood cinema, estab-
lishing intimacy and identification through use of the close-up.1 Moreover,
when these spectatorial practices of classical Hollywood cinema were com-
bined with the domestic exhibition of television, the sense of intimacy
and closeness was even more pronounced. The medium of television had
an immediacy and sense of presence that far outstripped radio and film.
Whether live or, like I Love Lucy, filmed “live,” the discursive patterns of
early television encouraged viewers to feel as if they were actually present
at the event or performance. As the 1946 book Here Is Television, Your
Window on the World suggests, founding discourses represented television
as both transparent and magical in that it not only extended the home but
brought the world into the family living room.
The genre of situation comedy was at a crucial stage in its develop-
ment. I Love Lucy and My Favorite Husband producer and writer Jess Oppen-
heimer explained that he and writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr. had
broken new ground with their radio sitcom: “We just weren’t writing what
was then considered the ‘in’ kind of radio comedy show, where you have a
series of comedy characters, each of whom comes in, does his own shtick,
and then exits. Instead, we did whole stories—situation comedy” (127–28).
Indeed, each episode of I Love Lucy has a rational setup, and the emphasis
on storytelling rather than shtick focused the show’s content on cultural
discourses of home and family life. The situation of I Love Lucy was the
domestic life of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, who were not stars but ordinary
people (although in later seasons Ricky’s career takes the gang to Hollywood
and Europe). When the writers wrote the initial scripts for the series, they
based the everyday details of the Ricardo marriage on the Arnaz’s marriage,
and many scenes set in the Ricardo bedroom as the characters wake up,
get dressed, or get ready for bed have an intimacy that is grounded in the
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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I Love Lucy | 33
mundane details of everyday life and in the audience’s knowledge that the
actors were really married.
In portraying everyday domesticity grounded in realism, I Love Lucy
brought a representation of home life into American homes at a time when
many families were buying televisions and working out their own versions
of domestic life. After World War II, Americans were, to use Elaine Tyler
May’s phrase, “homeward bound,” both moving toward domesticity and also
restrained by domesticity. The boundaries between home and the world,
long a demarcater of gender, were in flux. The ideology of domesticity—
an idealization of marriage, family, and the home prescribed, albeit differ-
ently, to both men and women—was an inherently unstable one (like the
other postwar ideologies of containment) that tried to legitimate traditional
Figure 3.1. Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo and Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo in I Love
Lucy. 1951–1961. Photo courtesy of Movie Star NewsFair.
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34 | Lori Landay
definitions of gender and the separation of spheres at a time when those
divisions were breaking down. At the core of the ideological construct of
femininity in the postwar era were women’s roles as housewives. High mar-
riage rates, the explosion of suburban housing, the baby boom, emphasis
on traditional gender roles, and a renewed belief in the importance of the
home all bolstered a domestic revival in the 1950s. This revival informed
the cultural context in which I Love Lucy struck such a chord, though with
a twist that evolved from the real lives of Ball and Arnaz.
The origin of the series would have been well known to most television
watchers, because it was repeated relentlessly in the popular publications
of the time—Life, Newsweek, Time, Look—women’s magazines, and daily
newspapers. The series originated in Ball and Arnaz’s desire to work together
so they could stop the work-caused separations that had characterized their
marriage. CBS was interested in making a television version of Ball’s radio
show, My Favorite Husband, but balked at the idea of casting Arnaz as the
husband because his Cuban ethnicity did not fit into the successful formula
centered on the radio show’s Midwestern family. Ball and Arnaz took mat-
ters into their own hands with a vaudeville tour intended to prove to CBS
that they could find and please an audience.
The pilot and then the series kept the dizzy housewife character and the
older couple foils relatively intact, but it changed the setting to New York and
the husband’s profession from banker to bandleader. In shifting the situation
from middle-class domesticity to the world of show business, I Love Lucy
tapped into the television trend of stars playing versions of themselves (George
Burns and Gracie Allen; Ozzie and Harriett Nelson) and enabled musical
numbers to be performed. The pilot centered on Larry Lopez, a bandleader
who wanted as normal life as possible, and his wacky wife, Lucy, who wanted
to get into show business. In the pilot, Larry laments, “I want a wife who’s
just a wife.” And, so a major conflict of I Love Lucy was articulated: the dis-
satisfied housewife eager to escape the home versus the world-weary husband
who wants his wife to provide him the comforts of home—characters clearly
not based on Ball and Arnaz’s real-life image or experience, although perhaps
on some fantasy of the domestic bliss that postwar discourses promised would
come from a conventional home life based on polarized gender roles.
How typical was the restlessness and frustration that Lucy embodied?
According to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, “the problem that has
no name” was unspoken yet widespread, and the comic treatment of women’s
desires for a life outside the home is more a precursor of 1960s–70s femi-
nism than typical of the 1950s. It might be that Ball and Arnaz (and their
writers) were continuing to perform the cultural work suggested by a 1938
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I Love Lucy | 35
Photoplay magazine poll of Hollywood stars, which found that 93 percent of
female stars and 78 percent of male stars believed in women having careers
after marriage in contrast to the general population that disapproved of wives
having jobs (May 41). I Love Lucy gives us both the actors’ vanguard per-
spective, which obviously Ball and Arnaz shared, and the more conventional
perspective of the population at large, which the show mimicked. Ball and
Arnaz and the writers, including Madelyn Pugh, one of very few women
television writers, based their work on their experiences as gendered people
in the postwar era; they were surrounded by the domestic revival sweeping
America, yet separate from it as part of Hollywood’s more egalitarian culture.
Seen in this light, I Love Lucy resonated so loudly in the early 1950s
because the show suggested the failure of the domestic ideal—based on the
rigid gender roles portrayed in popular culture to match up with people’s
real experiences of everyday life. The gap between domestic ideology and
social experience was larger in the 1950s than in the earlier half of the
twentieth century. Historian William Chafe summarizes some evidence to
support this: “The poll data showed that most citizens preferred to retain
traditional definitions of masculine and feminine spheres, even while modi-
fying the content of those spheres in practice” (171). When Lucille Ball is
quoted as saying, “I’m just a typical housewife at heart” in an article on
“America’s top saleswomen,” she is indeed holding a traditional definition
of femininity while in practice having an unconventional career by excelling
in the physical comedy that had been the province of men.
Of course, I Love Lucy was not a social realist critique of gender
roles—it was comedy. But, comedy in American culture in general, and in
television sitcoms in particular, is a major forum for reflecting and shap-
ing cultural ideals; it is a testing ground for social formations from the
simplest performance of mannerisms to the situation that gives the comedy
its premise. In order for a sitcom to be popular, it does not have to depict
how life really is, but it does have to portray a life that the audience likes.
Audiences not only liked I Love Lucy, they loved it, and they embraced
not only the series but a range of Lucy and Ricky commodities, includ-
ing his and hers matching pajamas, jewelry, nursery sets, aprons, smoking
jackets, dolls, diaper bags, and furniture for every room. As Ball explains
in her autobiography, “It was possible to furnish a house and dress a whole
family with items carrying our I Love Lucy label” (224). One ad proclaim-
ing “Live Like Lucy!” indicates how television brought the world into the
home and the home into the world with commodities. Clearly the vision of
domesticity enacted in the Ricardo’s apartment was, for Lucy, a commodified
one with many episodes centering on the struggle to get the money to buy
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36 | Lori Landay
something for herself or the home, perhaps most hilariously exemplified in
the episode “The Freezer.” Although Ball and Arnaz were in a far-different
financial situation from the Ricardos, or most of their middle-class viewers,
the show’s emphasis on love—on emotions, marriage, friendship, and the
pleasures of domestic life—outweighed the dissonance between Ball-Arnaz
and the Ricardos. At no point was this more apparent than when the off-
screen and on-screen lives of Ball and Arnaz were at their closest—when
the writers worked Ball’s real-life pregnancy into the show by making Lucy
Ricardo pregnant, too.
On January 19, 1953, two babies were born—in the morning, Ball and
Arnaz had a son, and in the evening, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo also had a son.
“Lucy Goes to the Hospital” hit an all-time high rating, with an estimate
of more than 44 million viewers. In blurring the line between reality and
artifice with the synchronic “real-life” and “fictional” births, I Love Lucy was
a metaphor for what television as an institution and apparatus was doing
anyway: making more permeable the traditional demarcations between pub-
lic and private, truth and artifice, and representation and social experience.
The seven pregnancy shows, culminating in “Lucy Goes to the Hos-
pital” (which barely had Lucy in it at all) built on the previous season and
a half when I Love Lucy established itself as a phenomenon. Many of the
most brilliant episodes are from this early period, including “Job Switch-
ing” with the hilarious candy factory conveyor belt scene and “Lucy Does
a TV Commercial” with the Vitameatavegamin scene. These episodes and
many more lesser-known ones followed the successful formula of building
up to comic climaxes that showcased the comedic talents of Ball and her
co-stars. New York Times Magazine writer Jack Gould explained the appeal
in March 1953:
“I Love Lucy” is as much a phenomenon as an attraction. Fun-
damentally, it is a piece of hilarious theatre put together with
deceptively brilliant know-how, but it also is many other things.
In part it is a fusion of the make-believe of the footlights and
the real-life existence of a glamorous “name.” In part it is the
product of inspired press agentry which has made a national
legend of a couple which two years ago was on the Hollywood
side-lines. (16)
The “inspired” publicity machine to which Gould refers was indeed indus-
trious and effective. By February 1952, just four months after I Love Lucy
premiered, the show was not only number one but also hit all the major
newspapers and magazines, making connections between the real-life actors
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I Love Lucy | 37
and their on-screen characters and intertwining their personal and profes-
sional stories.
Of the hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and features that
I have researched, hardly any stray from the Desilu publicity machine’s story
of how television saved their marriage. The story goes like this: After their
1940 marriage, they were so busy with their careers that they barely saw each
other, and they tried to find a vehicle in which they could work together.
Even though producers would not develop projects for them because of
Arnaz’s Cuban ethnicity and strong accent, Ball and Arnaz were convinced
they could be a success. The vaudeville act they took on the road was well
received, but they canceled the second half because of 39-year-old Ball’s
pregnancy. That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, but soon she was preg-
nant again, and they filmed the pilot episode when she was six months
pregnant. CBS and sponsor cigarette company Philip Morris picked up
the show, and they began production one month after their daughter Lucie
was born. The innovations of the production context figure largely in the
articles—that Ball and Arnaz owned the show through their company Desilu
Productions and filmed it before a live audience in Hollywood—but the
articles always stress the love story. As a March 1952 Chicago Sunday Tribune
article put it, “Desi and Lucille are particularly grateful to TV because it
has given them an opportunity to live a normal family life.” An April 6,
1952, L.A. Examiner article ran a picture of the couple smooching in bed
with the caption, “When Desi and Lucille do scenes like this in their TV
show, they aren’t just play-acting—they really mean it.” Or as “a friend” of
Ball’s explained in a July 1952 Look article, “The trouble with Lucy is that
her real life is so much like her reel life” (Silvian 7).
Of course, despite the PR copy that the show was based on the
Ball and Arnaz marriage, clearly it was not. In particular, the divergence
between talented, successful, and famous Lucille Ball and thwarted, unful-
filled, unknown Lucy Ricardo is huge, and although the actors had a daugh-
ter, the Ricardos were childless. But, it allowed Ball and Arnaz a bizarre
public fantasy of a private life closer to traditional gender roles than their
real-life partnership.
The situation of I Love Lucy articulated the contradictions of mar-
riage, gender, the battle of the sexes, and middle-class life—concerns of
the majority of television watchers and buyers. Ball attributed the series’
success to identification:
We had a great identification with millions of people. People
identified with the Ricardos because we had the same problems
they had. Desi and I weren’t your ordinary Hollywood couple on
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38 | Lori Landay
TV. We lived in a brownstone apartment somewhere in Manhat-
tan, and paying the rent, getting a new dress, getting a stale fur
collar on an old cloth coat, or buying a piece of furniture were
all worth a story. (qtd. in Andrews 225–26)
Note that the things Ball lists as ordinary problems all deal with domestic,
private life; the problem solving leads back to the core of the show, the
“love” between the couple. The actors’ collaborative marriage filters through
the comic representation of the demands of the companionate marriage,
the postwar ideal that imagined the husband and wife as a team support-
ing the husband’s work in the public sphere with the wife stationed in the
private sphere.
This aspect of the conflation of Ball-Arnaz and the Ricardos emerged
even more when the show incorporated Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy into
the fictional world of the series. When Ball and Arnaz revealed her pregnan-
cy to the show’s producer, they transformed what could have been the end
of the series into a new arena for comedy; not only had television “saved”
their marriage, but it enabled Ball to maintain her career and have a family.
Moreover, Ball performed the cultural work of a trickster in mainstream
America by being the first openly pregnant woman to perform on television,
which challenged accepted ideas about the impropriety of public representa-
tions of pregnancy. For example, even though the censors would not allow
anyone to say the word “pregnant” on the show (the French “enceinte” was
used instead), Arnaz refused when Philip Morris wanted Lucy’s pregnant
body hidden behind furniture. Instead of hiding Ball’s pregnancy, they made
comedy from Lucy’s cravings and mood swings, aspirations for the baby’s
future, Ricky’s sympathetic morning sickness and important role as father,
and cute maternity clothes (available at a store near you).
The intertwining of fictionality and “reality” in the pregnancy episodes
resulted in an emotional intensity that allowed the viewer to participate
in a highly mediated but nevertheless moving enactment of expecting a
baby. Throughout these reality-based episodes, the audience is privy to a
re-enactment of personal events, or rather, Ball and Arnaz turned their pri-
vate experience into a public representation that reflected and shaped the
popular pursuit of marriage and family.
The episode in which Lucy tells Ricky she is expecting was fore-
shadowed by media coverage of Ball’s pregnancy and reports that the baby
would be incorporated into the show. In the episode, Lucy tries to tell
Ricky the news, things interfere, and the dramatic irony builds because
the viewer knows what Ricky does not. The climax of the show occurs in
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I Love Lucy | 39
Ricky’s nightclub—and Ball and Arnaz were understandably emotional as
they filmed the scene. Ricky gets an anonymous note that a woman wants
to tell her husband they are expecting a “blessed event,” and Ricky goes
from table to table looking for the couple as he sings “Rockabye Baby.” He
finally comes to a table where Lucy is seated. After an emotional moment of
realization, Ricky sings “We’re Having a Baby” as he walks around the stage
with a tearful Lucy, and he flubs the lyrics of the song. The episode ends
with a close-up of the couple crying and laughing. Producer Oppenheimer
recalls that they did another take, filming a more upbeat scene as had been
originally scripted, but they decided to use the first one.
This moment is significant because it is Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz we
are watching, not the characters. The fiction of the television series becomes,
for a moment, transparent. Most striking, however, is the intimacy of this
scene, a familiarity felt by the audience for the people on the screen that
had been forged in a television series that revolved around the intimate
moments of marriage and everyday life. In order for the creative team to
choose the take in which the actors are choked up and have it work, there
had to have been a long setup to this moment paved with a hybrid of
fictionality and reality that transcends both.
The scene itself plays with the line between reality and artifice and
between public and private. As Ricky goes from table to table in search of
the parents-to-be, the camera is positioned in the audience, encouraging our
identification as a live audience member (reinforced by the laughter of the
studio audience that blurs with the diegetic laughter of the club audience).
The mise-en-scène of the nightclub stage and incorporation of musical per-
formance into the plot is typical of how early television oscillated between
domestic and theatrical space in shows such as The George Burns and Gracie
Allen Show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Make Room for Daddy,
as well as I Love Lucy. As Lynn Spigel explains, “By acknowledging its own
artifice and theatricality, the family comedy encouraged viewers to feel as if
they had been let in on a joke, while at the same time allowing them to
take that joke seriously” (Make Room 165). The strategy of letting the audi-
ence in on both the joke and the seriousness runs through the pregnancy
episodes and makes comedy out of reality—including Ball’s pregnant body
and what it could and could not do. Although there is not a great deal of
Ball’s trademark physical comedy in the episodes filmed while she was six
and seven months pregnant, there are scattered moments. Not only is Ball
a pregnant woman seen in public and continuing to work, but also in the
scenes that showcase her pregnant body, Lucy is competent and resourceful
in getting around its limitations.
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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40 | Lori Landay
The convergence of reality and fictionality suggested by Ball’s physi-
cal comedy peaked on January 19, 1953, when the two babies were born.
The Newsweek cover story of the same date, “Desilu Formula for Top TV:
Brains, Beauty, Now a Baby,” describes the schedule of the blessed events,
“If all goes well, newspaper readers all over the country will be treated on
Jan. 20 to the story of Mrs. Arnaz having a baby—the morning after they
see Mrs. Ricardo go to the hospital on TV. All this may come under the
heading of how duplicated in life and television can you get” (56). Because
no one knew the sex of the Ball-Arnaz baby, they could not duplicate that
piece of reality for the November filming of the episode “Lucy Goes to
the Hospital,” and it was kept secret that the Ricardo baby would be a
boy. The pregnancy episodes play on this uncertainty, and the sex became
a topic of popular speculation, culminating in the dual births. Examples
of the headlines reporting the births foreground the collision of reality
and fictionality—with fictionality winning out over reality: “Lucy Sticks to
Script: A Boy It Is!” (NY Daily Mirror, 1/20/53); “TV Was Right: a Boy for
Lucille” (Daily News, 1/20/53); “What the Script Ordered” (Life, 2/2/53).
Unlike the celebratory melding of real-life and fiction in the babies,
other real-life events were kept carefully away from the television text.
Although I Love Lucy was subversive about domestic containment, Ball,
Arnaz, the producers, and CBS downplayed the Red Scare accusation that
Lucille Ball was a Communist. A full discussion of the media representations
of how Ball had, in fact, registered as a Communist in 1938 in order, she
insisted, to please her grandfather, is beyond the scope of this chapter, but
Ball’s red hair almost had a very different—and career-ending—connotation.
The news of Ball’s 1953 hearings before the House Un-American Activities
Committee leaked out, leading to a Los Angeles-Herald Express headline,
in three-inch red letters: “LUCILLE BALL NAMED RED.” That night,
before the filming of the 1953–54 season premiere, Arnaz gave a serious
speech denouncing communism and labeling the rumors lies. The crowd
cheered. He ended as he always did, with, “And now, I want you to meet
my favorite wife,” but then he continued, “my favorite redhead—in fact,
that’s the only thing red about her, and even that’s not legitimate—Lucille
Ball!” (Sanders and Gilbert 81) Not surprisingly, the television series also
eschewed the real-life unrest in the Ball-Arnaz marriage, which ended in
divorce in 1960, about when the series ended. It seems that television could
not really save their, or anyone’s, marriage.
“There’s no dream she wouldn’t reach for, and no fall she wouldn’t
take.” This is how Walter Matthau described the universal appeal and come-
dic genius of Lucille Ball, and indeed Lucille Ball’s comic genius continues
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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I Love Lucy | 41
to entertain and amaze in its embrace of both hopeful aspiration and often
subsequent plummet (Sanders and Gilbert 368). In the role of Lucy, Ball
and her collaborators created one of the most beloved and central kinds
of cultural figures: a trickster, a subversive, paradoxical fantasy figure who
does what we cannot or dare not by moving between social spaces, roles,
and categories that the culture has deemed oppositional (Landay Trickster).
When faced with a situation that appears to have only two choices, the
trickster is the kind of hero/ine who creates a third possibility. But, the
trickster’s schemes often backfire, and then the trickster becomes the dupe.
Lucy is specifically a female trickster because her attempts to circumvent
the limitations of postwar domesticity oscillate between “masculine” and
“feminine” social roles, spaces, practices, and metaphors.
By calling attention to the power relations of the sexes in everyday
domestic life, I Love Lucy participated in a proto-feminist current build-
ing in American culture. The continued appeal of I Love Lucy in reruns is
due not only to comic brilliance but also to how it offers contemporary
audiences a fitting precursor to the women’s movement of the 1960s–70s.
Scholar George Lipsitz’s term “memory as misappropriation” suggests a show
can be popular because it represents the past as people wish it had been. I
Love Lucy recasts the domestic prison of the 1950s into the easily escapable
terrain of the female trickster. Lucy’s daring pursuit of her desires and her
irrepressible insistence that Ricky—and everyone else—acknowledge her as
a talented individual provide a model that may be radically different from
our impressions of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.
Moreover, by wiggling under, vaulting over, and sneaking past the boundary
between reality and fictionality, by playing fast and loose with the various
windows between the world and the home that television promised and
failed to be, Lucy the trickster delighted postwar Americans, and I Love
Lucy shaped situation comedy forever.
NOTES
Thanks to my husband, Richard Cownie, for editing help, as well as for
seeing the humor in things.
1. Despite the myth it started, Desilu did not invent the three-camera
system still used in television today. Arnaz and cinematographer Karl Freund (who
shot the German expressionist Metropolis in 1926 and was Ball’s cinematographer
on the 1943 MGM musical DuBarry Was a Lady) adapted the system pioneered by
Jerry Fairbanks but kept all three cameras rolling simultaneously. See Christopher
Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties, 53–56 and 65–68.
The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition : America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton, and Laura R. Linder, State
University of New York Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4529067.
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