I Love Lucy was a wildly popular American sitcom that aired on CBS from 1951 to 1957. It starred actors Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo and Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo, a couple both on- and off-screen. I Love Lucy was a comedy that surrounded Lucy and Ricky’s home and work life, often involving hilarity and over-the-top slapstick. Over the course of its six year run, 180 episodes were aired. It was the first television program to be taped, and reruns still play today.

I watched I Love Lucy throughout my childhood, probably more than any contemporary TV show. I loved its slapstick and witty comedy, even though I was young and many of the more subtle jokes went over my head. Revisiting I Love Lucy with more understanding of its comedy and the context in which the show was was made and produced, I see that it presents many contradictions. While it heavily played into stereotypes about gender and race, it was also incredibly progressive for its time. I Love Lucy starred both a woman and a interracial marriage, a kind of relationship that was unseen on TV in the 1950s. These contradictions contributed to the representation of the American dream and the “ideal” American life, an ideal which continues to permeate American culture. 

Breaking Stereotypes

In the age of movies such as The Searchers, a 1956 Western film starring John Wayne — the hyper-masculine, “ideal” man of that time — I Love Lucy was ahead of its time. Rather than portraying women as meek and passive, and only there to serve men, the sitcom starred a woman lead, and a hilarious woman at that. Lucy stated her mind, and while her opinions were sometimes shot down or not taken seriously, it was a major change for how women were viewed in this era. Taking place right after World War II, Lucy gave a voice to the frustrations, wants, and aspirations of the women who were forced to give up their jobs to the returning men and become housewives once more. The National Women’s History Museum puts Lucille Ball’s achievements as Lucy perfectly:

Aside from being one of the first pregnant characters on television, Lucille Ball portrayed Lucy in ways in which women had not been before seen on television. Lucy is a housewife who in every episode resists domestic life and/or a wife’s dependence on her husband, often to her husband’s disliking. She vies to be part of the outside world (a recurring struggle for her is to work her way into Ricky’s night club act), and is constantly coming up with schemes to get what she wants. Lucy was funny and zany, yet beautiful and feminine. Ball’s talent for both verbal and slapstick comedy paved the way for future television women.

Elissa Blattman, National Women’s History Museum

This next scene is one of the most famous scenes from I Love Lucy, and demonstrates Blattman’s point. Not only is it incredibly funny, but it also shows how Lucy and Ethel wanted to leave the house and get jobs, which they momentarily succeed at here:

I Love Lucy also featured the first interracial marriage on American television. Lucy was white and American, and Ricky was from Cuba (this was also true of the actors in real life). Showing a multi-cultural couple on TV was new territory, but the major success of the show spoke to a gradually changing America — one that would watch and thoroughly enjoy a TV show featuring a couple who weren’t both white.

Enforcing Stereotypes

Contrary to the numerous progressive aspects of the show, I Love Lucy also upheld stereotypes in many ways. Despite her hunger for life outside being a housewife, Lucy was written as a ditzy woman who was often talked to like a child by her husband. The same went for the Ricardo’s best friends, Ethel and Fred Mertz. Many episodes feature a story line where Ethel and Lucy are scheming to do something they shouldn’t be, and are caught and told off by their husbands. This enforced the idea that husbands should control their wives, and can tell them what to do.

Racial stereotypes were also the butt of many jokes on I Love Lucy.  Ricky’s Cuban accent was a common joke on the show, and Lucy would often repeat words back to Ricky the way he had said them, making fun of his pronunciation. 

The On-Screen American Dream

Although the breaking and enforcement of stereotypes in I Love Lucy are contradictory, they blend together to create the perfect American Dream. In the 1950s, the American Dream was the so-called “white picket fence” dream, which in my mind consisted of a married man and woman living in a beautiful home they could afford because of all their hard work. For the man, hard work meant being the breadwinner of the family, while the woman stayed at home to clean, cook, and take care of the children. Despite Lucy’s attempts to get out of the house, ultimately, Lucy and Ricky fit this ideal, especially once they had their first child, Little Ricky. The American Dream was also heightened in I Love Lucy because Ricky was from Cuba. He came to the United States, got a job at the Tropicana club, and did so well that he eventually became the owner and renamed it Club Babalu. This is a common expectation for current immigrants, especially those who cross the southern boarder, coming to the United States: that if they find honest work, and if they try hard, they can succeed and support their family. This of course is a myth, because they often aren’t afforded the opportunity to get “honest” work, let alone get into the country.

This narrative of hard work leading to and directly causing success (that is, if you were a man, and even a man of color in this case), as well as the need for women to be in the home, was broadcast across the nation along with many other TV shows at the time, and it told Americans that this was the ideal, and that it was possible. Authors of An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US describe that their vision of the American Dream (although it is a myth, they add) also comes from 1950s television shows, in part: 

When I think of the American Dream, I still have the image of the perfect nuclear family in mind… sometimes I add a pristine white picket fence. Although this scene is clear in my mind, I’m not entirely sure where it came from… it is, I suspect, an amalgamation of things I saw as a child: 1950s sitcom reruns of Leave It to Beaver, commercials for dish soap that aired during the day…

Jenn Brandt and Callie Clare, An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US

The Off-Screen American Dream

As well as playing an on-screen couple, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were married in real life. They wed in 1940, seven years after Arnaz fled from Cuba to the United States in 1933. Three years after their wedding, Arnaz became an American citizen. Ball and Arnaz seemed to be living the American Dream off-screen — they were happily married, and were very successful thanks to I Love Lucy and their production company, Desilu Studios (which Lucille Ball eventually owned outright). America loved them. They had their second child, Desi Arnaz Jr., in 1953, at the exact same time that Ball’s character Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky. Their real lives seemed to coincide with their television ones perfectly, but behind the scenes, starting when I Love Lucy premiered, their marriage was crumbling. In 1960, three years after the conclusion of I Love Lucy, Ball and Arnaz got a divorce. 

Although Lucille Ball was never a producer for I Love Lucy, unlike Desi Arnaz, she became the first woman television producer for a major show with The Lucy Show, an I Love Lucy spinoff that aired from 1962 to 1968.

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