A Love Most Enduring

Not even a pandemic could overshadow the 70th anniversary of the funniest show ever on TV. Since October, there have been at least three official opportunities to love everybody’s favorite redhead, Lucille Ball.“Lucy,” a 10-part audio documentary (with three bonus installments), formed the third season of the TCM-produced podcast “The Plot Thickens”; an Amazon-produced dramatic film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, “Being the Ricardos,” features Nicole Kidman as Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz; and “Lucy and Desi,” a new documentary directed by Amy Poehler, is streaming on Amazon.They have certain key ideas in common and the viewpoints never conflict, not least because Lucie Arnaz, the star couple’s oldest child, actively consulted on all three. She is heard extensively in “Lucy” and “Lucy and Desi,” while in “Being the Ricardos” she and her younger brother, Desi Arnaz Jr., are credited as executive producers.The major issue that they all agree on might be hard to imagine for “Lucy” buffs, even though she herself said this in interviews: Lucille Ball was not “naturally funny.” Groucho Marx, quoted in Stefan Kanfer’s 2003 biography “Ball of Fire,” described her as “an actress, not a comedienne. There’s a difference. I’ve never found her to be funny on her own. She’s always needed a script.”Whereas someone like Jonathan Winters or Robin Williams could just walk out on stage and instantly make people laugh, Ball had to work at it. In place of a natural gift for humor, she had an endless appetite for such labor: As is shown in “Being the Ricardos,” Ball would stage a piece of physical comedy or repeat a line of dialog over and over, exploring an idea from every possible angle, figuring out how to milk it for maximum comic potential. If the two great comedy shows of the Golden Age of TV (arguably of all time) are “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners,” the differences in the attitudes of their two comedic superstars are telling. Jackie Gleason seems to have wanted to work as little as possible, grew tired of his show after a single season, and only occasionally bowed to the millions of requests to revive the characters. Ball seemed to be happy only when she was making the magic happen. After six seasons comprising 180 episodes of “I Love Lucy” (1951-57), she brought the Ricardos back in 13 more special hour-long shows between 1957 and 1960 — and then she just kept going. She starred in three more shows, all of which could be considered variations on the original “I Love Lucy” in that they centered around a zany redhead with endless hairbrained schemes. Lucille Ball was like the heroine of the traditional fairy tale (and classic 1948 British film) “The Red Shoes”; once she had the red shoes on — i.e., had figured out how to create great television comedy — she just couldn’t stop dancing.Most fans agree that the later iterations, “The Lucy Show” (1962-68) and “Here’s Lucy” (1968-74), which both ran for six seasons, and especially the aborted “Life with Lucy” (1986) are but faint shadows and echoes of the classic original, “I Love Lucy.” Yet, when I think back at the funniest “Lucy” moments ever, quite a few of them derive from the second series — particularly Lucy’s give and take with co-stars Gale Gordon and, in later seasons, Carol Burnett. (The format and cast of “The Lucy Show” changed so many times that it could be considered two or three different shows. I find the later color seasons to be funnier than the earlier ones.)I also notice when watching the new documentary, “Lucy and Desi,” or indeed when I’m binge-ing on episodes of “I Love Lucy,” that I find myself crying as much as I do laughing. Ball and Arnaz were well aware of a fundamental precept that the greatest entertainers all seem to know: Once you open up your audience emotionally by getting them to laugh, it then becomes easier to hit them even harder by moving them to tears.As portrayed by Ms. Kidman and described by Ms. Arnaz, Lucille Ball was anything but sentimental. She comes off as not exactly cold but more a creature of intellect than emotion; more Mr. Spock than Captain Kirk, to use an analogy from another classic TV show created by Desilu. “The Lucy Show” has a lot of the laughs of “I Love Lucy” but none of the heart; I can’t remember ever openly weeping during any of Ball’s ’60s or ’70s performances. Of all the “Lucy” shows, only the first had “love” both in the title and in every single storyline. Arnaz famously said that Ball was responsible for 90 percent of the show’s success, and he (along with Vivian Vance and William Frawley and everyone else) deserved only 10 percent of the credit. Yet it was the interplay and the romantic/erotic tension between Lucy and Ricky that gave the show its emotional core. Lucy’s hilarious antics play against the soft, romantic underpinning like two contrapuntal tunes arranged as countermelodies. The later shows, sadly, lack that greater emotional resonance. Even though the couple divorced in 1960, Ball was always quick to give Arnaz as much credit as possible. She is accurately depicted as doing as much in “Being the Ricardos,” wherein Ms. Kidman-as-Lucy repeatedly reminds everyone that it was Arnaz’s development of the three-camera process that made “I Love Lucy” and the entire Desilu enterprise possible. When Ball received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Kennedy Center in 1986, she lobbied the organization to include Arnaz as well. He died five days before the presentation, but in his final hours Arnaz wrote a speech that was read posthumously by the actor Robert Stack. It ended with the words, “‘I Love Lucy’ was always more than a title.”

A Love Most Enduring

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