The Living Experiment
One evening my family was seduced into watching back-to-back episodes of "I Love Lucy." At the end of one show would be a preview of the next, and we were helplessly glued to the TV for another half hour. "Oh kids, you HAVE to watch this one. Lucy and Ethel go work in a chocolate factory." Or, "I love this one. It's the vegemeatavitamin commercial." "This is the Harpo Marx one!"
These shows are timeless, and we howled with laughter at least once each episode.
At the same time, we noticed that I Love Lucy is amazingly dated, as well we could expect after almost 50 years. At the beginning of the chocolate
factory show, Ricky laments that Lucy has overdrawn her bank account, again, despite the fact that he "gives her plenty of money."
So Lucy and Ethel go to the 1950s version of a job placement service, where the first questions the interviewer (a suit-clad man, I might add) asks are, "Do you type?" and "Do you know stenography?" Ask 20 college women in this age of high technology, and I will bet few of them will have heard of stenography.
While Lucy and Ethel are trying to find a job, Ricky and Fred are struggling with the tedious tasks of ironing and preparing dinner. The studio crowd goes wild when Fred asks Ricky how much rice to make per person and Ricky shrugs, saying, "I don't know. A pound?" And we chuckle when the rice bubbles over like a washing machine filled with too much detergent.
In the end, they all agree to "let the men make the money and let the women spend it."
Oh my, times have changed.
Despite the sexism, the formal clothes, the twin beds, and all the stereotypes, I Love Lucy remains funny and charmingly innocent all these years later. While we cringe when Ricky yells, "I don't care if you won't speak to me. Just get up and make me my breakfast," we also laugh at its absurdity. For those of us too young to remember the 1950s, we can only guess that it must have been absurd even then.
I asked our kids what seemed different about the show from modern times, and they said, " weird music" (big band!), and "they smoked cigarettes," and "the show's black and white," and "they wore more tuxedo-like things." The only reference to dated gender stereotypes was the mention that "Ricky doesn't know how to cook," which isn't very illustrative since their own dad is similarly impaired in the kitchen, although he can make rice.
Our boys, still in grade school, haven't yet learned of the "long ago" days when the men worked and the women kept house. In my boys' world, some women work outside the home while others "stay home," and women do not by definition subordinate to men. My kids see parents as equal partners with differing yet complementary areas of strength, expertise, and leadership.
Things were vastly different in Lucy and Ricky's era, of course, but our funny bones haven't changed all that much.
When Lucy smuggles a 25-pound block of cheese onto an airplane by disguising it as a bundled-up baby, we roar. Although the plane is distinctly dated now, with its stewardesses instead of flight attendants and its interior all covered in chrome, Lucy's humor resonates. She could cradle a block of cheese right now, in the age of Y2K, and we would still laugh.
And 50 years from now, in the next century, in the new millennium, as the disparity between then and now widens and gender roles blur further, Lucy will be entertaining still.
Kerri Havnen Gordon lives in Mountain View with her husband, two sons, and her mischievous cat, Lucy.