I Love Lucy

I first saw Lucille Ball while holidaying in North America a few years ago. She seemed to be on at something like 6pm every evening, and when I actually sat down to watch it, I found it really funny, especially for its age.

Years later I saw an I Love Lucy box set going extremely cheaply in my local bookshop, so snapped it up and hoped I'd like it. I've been watching the series from the first episode, way back in 1951, and have to say it really has stood the test of time considerably.
Lucille Ball was a bit of a pioneer, both in terms of television comedy/ situation comedy and in the way she opened doors for female comedians, and made TV execs and viewers alike realise that a woman could carry a show herself, and be funny and successful too.

Lucy was a very talented and naturally funny lady. Although she didn't write these early I Love Lucy shows, it is her performance which turns amusing scripts into laugh out loud funny comedy more often than not. It is the physical comedy which impresses most - before Ball's rise to fame on US TV, most people had only really seen physical comedy and slapstick performed by men, such as Laurel and Hardy, Keaton and Abbot and Costello. But here was a woman who was confident in her ability to be funny and make people laugh, unbound by the usual need to maintain a respectable femininity for the public.

Those huge, innocent wide eyes, the pursed lips, the daft mop of curly hair, the slightly ungainly way she held herself. In Lucille Ball circa 1952 you can trace forward a direct link to Grace Adler from Will and Grace, devised 47 years later. Lucy was the obvious template for Grace, and while Debra Messing does the job well, it's very been there, done that. Lucille Ball was getting herself into ridiculous but hilarious scrapes four decades before Grace shacked up with a dysfunctional gay lawyer in New York.

I also like spotting what have subsequently become comedy cliches being invented. Like with Laurel and Hardy and their contemporaries, many of what we class as film cliches today were invented in the 1920s and 30s, and looking at them today you can see convention being created, before people knew what to expect. I Love Lucy's backbone is the now tried and trusted sit-com standard of misunderstanding - in the 1950s it was funny because it was new, in the 21st century it's only funny if you're putting a new spin on it. Or indeed, not doing it at all. Comedy runs out of ideas very quickly, but back in the 1950s there was no such danger because Lucille Ball was doing this for the first time.

I also have a box set of episodes from Lucille's later The Lucy Show series, in colour (1962-68), and look forward to charting the differences between these two series, and how comedy was performed then and now.

I Love Lucy, originally transmitted October 15th 1951 - May 6th 1957.