The Lucy Lineage, Cont.

Like many Americans, I grew up watching “I Love Lucy.” Like many of the Nielsen households, I have on occasion tuned into “Will & Grace.” Carla Hall, Debra Messing is no Lucy (“At Play in Lucy Territory,” Sept. 2) and “Will & Grace” is no “I Love Lucy”!

Hall’s article suggests that beautiful, sexy women cannot be funny. Messing makes a statement that “she [Lucy] doesn’t have a sexuality and that’s very powerful.” Come on Debra, Lucy played as sexual as 1950s television would allow. David Kohan, co-creator of “Will & Grace,” muses, “Ball so obliterated all her movie star glamour that she looked like a clown.” Did he watch the same show I did?

Ball’s Lucy Ricardo had the painted lips not of a clown but of a ‘50s screen goddess. Her coiffed hair and JCPenney-chic wardrobe were the envy of many a housewife across the nation. Lucy looked like a clown when she wanted to; otherwise she was picture-perfect pretty. As for the Ricardos’ seemingly sexless marriage Hall refers to, again they went as far as times would allow.

Ball set a standard of comedy genius that women and men will forever be attempting to attain. Messing may in fact be a talented actress and “Will & Grace” may be a highly rated comedy, but I doubt that 50 years from now television audiences will be watching reruns of it the way they will be of “I Love Lucy.”

WILLIAM BERTRAND

North Hollywood

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So, by virtue that she has red hair and stars in a sitcom, Debra Messing of the mediocre “Will & Grace” warrants comparison to Lucille Ball?

Thirty years from now, it’s hard to envision impersonators donning Debra Messing wigs and re-creating her “classic” routines. Using that same criteria, Robert Wuhl--who writes, directs and stars in HBO’s awful “Arli$$”--is the equivalent of Orson Welles, since the latter was a similar hyphenate in “Citizen Kane.” The star of Fox’s “Titus” attempts to blend humor with pathos, so clearly he’s the modern Chaplin.

As the current, inferior big-screen comedy “Rat Race” has proven, by trying to re-create the classic cast of comedians from “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” with today’s second-string jokers, audiences accept no substitutes.

JOAN MAUPIN

Toluca Lake

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David Waghalter (Letters, Sept. 9) called Kirstie Alley the funniest woman on television at the time.

He apparently never saw Shelley Long as Diane Chambers on “Cheers.” If Long had changed her name to Diane Chambers and taken that character to the movies, she would have been a big star.

BILL STEIN

Arroyo Grande