First and Still Funniest

She called it “the black stuff,” because the lines were single-spaced and in caps. They were stage directions--the genius of Lucille Ball written out on the page, reduced to a series of actions and gestures. On “I Love Lucy,” which ran from 1951 to 1957, the black stuff placed Ball in the comic moment--on an assembly line of chocolates or a window ledge. A different comedian might have committed the directions to memory. But Ball internalized them, rehearsing scenes down to the nub.

“I Love Lucy” celebrates its 50th anniversary this fall. In the decades since, future generations of writers have come across the black stuff firsthand. When Michael Patrick King, executive producer of the HBO comedy “Sex and the City,” was a writer on the CBS sitcom “Murphy Brown,” he got a copy of the famous Vitameatavegamin episode from Ned Davis, an assistant director on “Murphy Brown” and the son of Madelyn Pugh Davis, one of the original writers on “I Love Lucy.”

In the episode, Lucy, having connived her way into starring in a commercial for a health tonic, slowly gets drunk as she samples the product in take after take. Reading the script, King discovered a page and a half of the black stuff. “What was interesting about it was, every single thing she did was written in the stage directions,” he says, “... right down to the attitude on the winks.”

Ball was on the air for six seasons as Lucy Ricardo (nee MacGillicuddy), the star-struck New York housewife of a Cuban bandleader, and in that time she set a bar that female television stars are still trying to hit. Since Lucy, other women have come along to present their versions of comic empowerment. Whomever you name--Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Roseanne, Marlo Thomas, Ellen DeGeneres, Sarah Jessica Parker--it always somehow gets back to Lucy.

“Until she came along, early on, women who were funny were, I don’t know, considered rather unladylike, not very attractive and tomboyish,” says Burnett, who was bursting onto the scene herself, in the 1959 Broadway musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” when an already-famous Ball came backstage to introduce herself. “I think the exception to that in the movies was Carole Lombard, but when it came to TV it was Lucille. She could be just pratfall-silly but still be a beautiful woman.”

It is the near-impossible package--the ability to be convincing as both comedian and sexualized being--that every female sitcom star is asked to deliver. To some degree, Ball hid her looks behind the mask of the clown, but it was the combination of femininity and comic aggression that the “I Love Lucy” writers exploited.

“Lucy never said, ‘Well, I don’t want to look that bad.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to get dirty.’ She would do anything,” says Madelyn Pugh Davis, who lives in Los Angeles and is one of the few surviving members of the show’s creative team.

Doing anything meant asking Ball if she could belt out “Glow Worm” on the saxophone. (“Give me two weeks,” Davis says Ball told the writers.) It meant fitting her with a prosthetic nose and then setting it aflame (in the William Holden Hollywood episode). The stunts she pulled serve today as a metaphor for comic range, even if the sitcoms are more vigilant about putting on airs of sophistication.

“It seems like in modern times women are being portrayed, in terms of TV, as more troubled or neurotic ... the whole ‘thirtysomething’ neuroses kind of thing,” says Jenna Elfman, star of the ABC sitcom “Dharma & Greg.” “You don’t find very many beautiful women willing to be funny.”

By funny, Elfman means silly or outrageous. Broad, unabashed, “Lucy” comedy. She means Mary Tyler Moore breaking down in Mr. Grant’s office or Julia Louis-Dreyfus making a fool of herself on the dance floor in “Seinfeld.” Elfman has earned “Lucy” comparisons for the role she plays--the free-spirited half of an urban couple, a Lucy to a Ricky (in this case, a buttoned-down corporate lawyer played by Thomas Gibson).

“I would watch her for hours growing up,” Elfman says of Ball. “Her and Carol [Burnett] and ‘Get Smart.’ I would watch them in terms of, what’s the bottom line? Why does it always work?” Among other things, “they really allowed scenes to play out and moments to play out,” she says. “There will be a whole two minutes between lines.” It does seem remarkable to watch an episode of “I Love Lucy” and note the silence with which Ball could work: What sitcom today would trust its star to hold an audience’s attention for minutes on end, without words?

As Davis characterizes the climate on “I Love Lucy,” the writers were too harried to be aware that they were doing anything beyond surviving another week.

When “I Love Lucy” went on the air 50 years ago, the show had three writers: Jess Oppenheimer, Davis and her writing partner, Bob Carroll Jr. Fresh from radio, where they had written for Ball on the program “My Favorite Husband,” the three churned out nearly 40 “I Love Lucy” episodes out of the gate, Davis says; in six seasons, they would complete 179 episodes, an unaired pilot and a Christmas special. They worked four days a week, Monday through Thursday, and the writers often drew from their own lives in dreaming up Lucy moments.

Once, says Davis, she and Carroll were walking in Hollywood when they happened by a pizza maker flipping dough in the window at Micelli’s. Could Lucy do this? They called Ball at home, and the actress came to the restaurant and began flipping pizzas, in plain sight of passersby.

“Buster Keaton told her once, ‘Know your props,”’ Davis says.

Ball rehearsed tirelessly, working on instinct and sweat. She was afforded the space for greatness by men--her then-husband and co-star, Desi Arnaz, Oppenheimer, the show’s producer and head writer, and Marc Daniels, the director--who were shrewd enough to get out of Ball’s way. “I Love Lucy” is credited with innovating the multi-camera filmed comedy (television was a live medium, previously), but the series ushered in another relative innovation: a comedy in which the woman, so to speak, wore the pants.

Equally key was the inherent trust Ball put in her writers--and in Arnaz, who also served as the show’s executive producer. These days, the stars of sitcoms also routinely serve as executive producers of their own shows, doubling as both star and arbiter of what said star will do, but Ball was at one remove from her character.

“She never liked to see the script until Monday morning because she wanted it to be fresh,” Davis says. They held a table reading Monday and began rehearsing that day. By Thursday, when they filmed before a live audience, Ball required few reshoots, says Davis. Cameras rolled at 7, and they were out by 10, she says.

By season five, when the show’s writing staff swelled from three to five with the addition of Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, “I Love Lucy” was a well-oiled machine. Mostly, says Schiller, they worked backwards--figuring out the big physical gag first, making sure Ball was up for the risk, then contriving a reason to get Lucy in the moment.

Nobody underestimated how important the formula was. As Schiller recalls it, the sentiment around the set went like this: “If anything happens to her, we’re all in the shrimp business.”

If Ball was television’s first sitcom star, she was also, less immediately, its first feminist.

“I Love Lucy,” Davis notes, came along in the 1950s, when women were expected to be content as homemakers. Into that atmosphere arrived Lucy, a housewife who dreams of being in show business and strains against accepted behavior to get there.

To “Sex and the City’s” King, that concept is as radical in its own way as the show he’s producing, which has raised eyebrows for its frank depiction of women and their sex lives. King sees a definite link between his lead character, the Manhattan sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw, and Lucy.

“She looked for a life in show business in a way that Carrie looks for the right man,” King says. “She really wanted to be a movie star. Just the idea of a housewife who wants to be in show biz as the running backbone of a series is crazy.”

Today, a woman holding down a show of her own hardly seems culturally significant--next season’s new sitcoms feature DeGeneres as an openly gay professional woman (“The Ellen Show”) and Reba McEntire as a single mother (“Reba”).

But in many ways, the one-sided rules for female clowns remain the same--if Jim Carrey, for instance, can have a love interest in a movie like “Dumb & Dumber,” a buddy comedy about two buffoons, would the same latitude be afforded a female counterpart?

Ball’s buffoonery was not achieved lightly. It was a high-wire act that few actresses have been able to pull off since. And this, more than anything, astounds the women who have followed her onstage.

She got the essence of the gags intuitively, says DeGeneres, without breaking her character’s innate flightiness. “You have to be really smart to be able to play that. I don’t think anybody has ever come along to top that quality that she had.”

There were delightful echoes of Lucy and Ethel in “Laverne & Shirley,” for instance, and in a different context, Tracey Ullman, in her late-1980s sketch-comedy series for Fox, “The Tracey Ullman Show,” pulled off over-the-top comedy.

But more often such attempts feel forced, proving that even gifted actresses can debase themselves when trying to hit Lucy-esque heights. You can sense this in the ABC sitcom “The Joan Cusack Show” and more glaringly in last season’s CBS sitcom “Bette,” starring Bette Midler.

In “Bette,” which was canceled after one season, Midler attempted broad comedy rooted in her public persona as a middle-aged diva. There were marked differences, a self-referential quality that “I Love Lucy” didn’t have, but Midler was clearly attempting to create the kind of outsized character Ball did.

Interviewed by The Times as she readied her show, Midler addressed the legacy.

“It’s 50 years later,” she said. “I’m sure if she were working today, she would be doing something relatively sophisticated too. On the other hand, the level of playing she did and the things she chose to do, like the [chocolate candy] assembly line, were absolutely top of the line in those days.”

It’s the level of playing, as opposed to the character she played, that have kept “I Love Lucy” sophisticated.

“As ditzy as she was, she was also a very commanding presence,” says Carol Leifer, who has been a standup comic, a writer (“Seinfeld”) and the star of her own short-lived sitcom (“Alright Already”). But male writer friends, she has found, often express the same kind of indifference to “I Love Lucy” that women feel toward those icons of male slapstick aggression, the Three Stooges.

“They think it’s kind of shallow, empty, crazy-lady comedy,” says Leifer. But to the writer-performer, “I Love Lucy” expressed Ball’s “male energy” in a way that is unlikely to be recaptured. Indeed, seen this way, it’s Ball who emerges as the original, followed by a long trail of shallow, empty, crazy-lady comedy. *

The Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills salutes “I Love Lucy’s” 50th anniversary with a series of events Oct. 3-31. Call the museum at (310) 786-1000 for more information.