Frame enlargements from “ Lucy does a TV Commercial.” Ball parodies advertising and television “magic” with her performance. a. Lucy presents herself in the familiar pose of the advertising pitch, b. but her reaction contradicts her line, “It’s so tasty, too.” c. Ball’s performance of Lucy getting drunk as she rehearses the commercial is the comic climax of the episode. d. Ball’s wink expresses the tricky intertwinings of layers of reality, artifice, narrative, and advertising.

The situation of I Love Lucy articulated the contradictions of marriage, gender, the battle of the sexes, and middle-class life: the things of concern to a majority of television buyers and television watchers. Ball attributed the series’ success to how it made comedy out of everyday life:

Desilu, the Ball-Arnaz production company, received five percent of the gross earnings of the products the stars endorsed; beginning in October 1952, there were 2,800 retail outlets for Lucille Ball dresses, blouses, sweaters, and aprons as well as Desi Arnaz smoking jackets and [End Page 29] robes.

One of the attractions of I Love Lucy was its blend of reality and fiction, or “real life” and “reel life,” as a 1953 Look article called it. Self-reflexive jokes like Lucy’s statement that Ricky needs a “pretty girl” in his act bisociatel1 Links to an external site. inept housewife Lucy Ricardo and TV star Lucille Ball, calling attention to how she both is and is not the “pretty girl” in the various narrative frames of the I Love Lucy phenomenon. Interwoven are the episode, the advertisements during the episode, knowledge about the series and its stars from secondary texts, the cultural contexts that inflect the combinations of private housewife/public pretty girl and femininity/comedy with contradictions, and the ideology of the feminine mystique.

The blurring of the boundaries between whether it is Lucy and Ricky or Ball and Arnaz smoking Philip Morris cigarettes suggests some of the issues surrounding commodification and the Lucy phenomenon.

In this sequence gender and class hierarchies are transgressed. Lucy as “Eugene” emphatically takes physical control of the space, throwing Ricky about the room like a rag doll, and becoming a sexual predator with the reiterated demand: “Let's neck!” Ricky and Fred are horrified by these hillbilly termagants who offend their expectations of acceptable femininity.

Arnaz’ proposal underlines the theatrical roots of sitcom, aligning it with vaudeville as a staged medium (Mills 2009 Links to an external site., 35). The show's casting was similarly informed by that tradition. William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz, the Ricardo's landlord and neighbour, had worked the vaudeville circuit in the 1920s before becoming a character actor in Hollywood (Higham 1986 Links to an external site., 112, 113; Kanfer 2003 Links to an external site., 130). The first season of I Love Lucy was thus steeped in vaudeville.

In these studies vaudeville is a form of popular entertainment by and for the people rather than the mass-produced amusements which followed: “a hybrid form of theatre, offering a distinct arena for communication that people could enter and leave from their own particular subcultures” (Snyder 2000 Links to an external site., xix). Early television comedy retained traces of this hybridity. Burlesque and vaudeville formats and performance styles are visible in 1950s television shows, when they were still within living memory (Mills 2009 Links to an external site., 35).

That dualism – between feminine/unfeminine, object/subject, control/chaos is the basis of Ball's performance in I Love Lucy and she deploys her skills to shatter any easy opposition between such binaries.

The vaudeville heritage on which Lucille Ball drew for her comedy performances offered a range of techniques which embodied fluid gender and sexual identities. Female and male vaudevillians created characters which often transgressed class, gender and race binaries, and the deployment of parody, mimicry and imitation was a particular province of female performers (Glenn 2000 Links to an external site., 74). The height of the vaudeville boom in America offered female performers a space in which they could enact “rebellious, sexual and aggressive comedy” (Kibler 1998 Links to an external site., 60). M Alison Kibler describes a successful vaudeville performer in the early years of the twentieth century:

Lucy taught television about its potential as a medium. When we flip our way around the dial and find a show that is truly exceptional, we have a natural inclination to assign credit to creative genius. We see something funny, thoughtful, wise, beautiful, or compelling, and we want to believe that such brilliance can emerge out of hard work and ingenuity. Creativity is often defined as a singular vision: so how can such singularity of mind come from a collection of, arguably, dozens of people? And yet, sometimes if it’s the right collection of media makers, the results can turn into the best television has, and perhaps ever will, offer.

So was this successful and talented writer, rising to the top of this newly formed industry, venerated in Hollywood as the first of a new breed of writer? One might assume that though his name might not be known by audiences, people within the industry would know him as one of the brains behind bringing Hollywood writers new business in the form of the telefilm. The answer, though, is quite the opposite: Oppenheimer’s role as both a writer and a producer proved extremely threatening to a community of writers who saw producers as management, and therefore their adversaries in contract and labor negotiations. Although Oppenheimer was a dues-paying member of the Screen Writers Guild as well as the newly formed Television Writers of America, his position as a producer overshadowed his work as a writer. Hollywood writers’ agitation regarding Oppenheimer’s hyphenated role ultimately played itself out in a National Labor Relations Board hearing.

role as head writer-producer. The head writer is—at best—a benevolent dictator who provides a consistency of voice from episode to episode, runs the writers’ room, works on set with the director, actors, cinematographer, and designers ensuring that the words on the page translate to the screen, and often sits in the editing room helping the editor craft a story. One could easily assume that it was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz who were the show’s creators, but they were not. Lucy’s creator was a man whose name is barely remembered and rarely mentioned: Jess Oppenheimer.

Desi Arnaz, as the head of Desilu, was like the best of studio moguls of the Hollywood era, assembling the most talented workers available.

1. Lucy and Ricky’s position as the first interracial couple on television; 2. cinematographer Karl Freund’s use of a multi-camera system to record the series on film in front of a live audience; 3. the announced arrival of Little Ricky; 4. making its stars, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the first television millionaires; and 5. being one of the series that convinced networks and studios that telefilm production in Hollywood would become the future of the industry.

Many subsequent war-related radio shows, Hollywood movies, newsreels, government films, and print media stories similarly used freedom and domestic security to justify American intervention in the war and citizens' extensive wartime sacrifices.

By prompting listeners to interpolate this heart-rending account with their own aspirations for home ownership, this scene reinforces historian Robert West- brook's argument that American wartime propaganda regularly eschewed abstract appeals to the defense of liberal ideology and instead pointed to security of home and family as primary reasons for Americans' wartime sacrifices (Westbrook, 1993).

With this chilling scene still fresh, "America at War" returned to the homefront and advised each of its listeners: "you too are in it, you and your family and your friends and your church" (Corwin, February 14, 1942).

Office of War Information

Before the United States entered the Second World War, American mass media generally shied away from endorsing either side of the global conflict

Throughout the entire disagreement between the press and the broadcasting industry one fact stands out above all others, and that is that both parties failed to consider the public at all.

6. The broadcasters were to bear all costs of the new service.

First, radio broadcasting was not free.

They stopped reading the papers and went to other sources which would tell them about radio, and the listings returned

The role of broadcasting was going to change, but the nation's editors and publishers were slow to recognize this change, even as it was taking place.