Quote of the day:

The man who says his wife can’t take a joke forgets that she took him.
—Oscar Wilde

In Jess Oppenheimer’s memoir Laughs, Luck…and Lucy: How I Came to Create the Most Popular Sitcom of All Time he relates how he got to work on Fanny Brice’s radio show, “Baby Snooks”, and when that ended he moved to “My Favorite Husband” which starred Lucille Ball and Richard Denning.

His co-writers on the show were Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr., and he discovered that the three of them worked well together.

He quickly made some changes in the way the show was written and the nature of the characters to make them more relatable to the radio audience and to take advantage of Lucille Ball’s comedic strengths.

But there was still a problem.

Lucille Ball just wasn’t comfortable working in front of a live audience and she tended to tense up.

Even with all of the changes in the show, I still had a problem—Lucy was relatively stiff working in front of an audience. She just didn’t have the wildly antic quality that I was looking for. I had been trying for some time to get her and Dick Denning to loosen up and act out the jokes and reactions, to dramatize what was going on, instead of just standing there waiting to read the next line when the laugh subsided. I knew how effective this could be from watching Jack Benny do his radio program. Jack would lay his hand against his cheek, open his eyes wide, and look out at the studio audience, slowly changing his point of view, like a comic lighthouse. And as long as he looked, they laughed.

Dick Denning was a lost cause. When I tried to explain to him what I was looking for, he simply said, “If I take my eyes or my finger off that script, I’ll never find my place again.”

I remember telling Lucy, “Let go. Act it out. Take your time.” But she was simply afraid to try. So one day, at rehearsal, I handed Lucy a couple of Jack Benny tickets.

She looked at me blankly. “What are these for?”

“I want you to go to school,” I told her.

It did the trick. When Lucy came into the studio for the next rehearsal, I could see she was excited. “Oh my God, Jess,” she gushed, “I didn’t realize!”

She just couldn’t wait to get started trying out the new, emancipated attitude she had discovered. On that week’s show Lucy really hammed it up, playing it much broader than she ever had before. She coupled this with her newfound freedom of movement, and there were times I thought we’d have to catch her with a butterfly net to get her back to the microphone. The audience roared their approval, and Lucy loved it. So did I.

Jack Benny eventually became one of Lucy’s biggest fans, as well as her next-door neighbor when she and Desi moved to Beverly Hills. And six years after I asked Lucy to attend that broadcast of the Jack Benny Program, Jack repaid the compliment. He required all of his writers to “go to school” by attending a special screening of I Love Lucy—the episode in which William Holden sets fire to Lucy’s nose.

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