funny girl

Flippin' the Script #7

In sixth grade, I told my history teacher I wanted to do my National History Fair project on I Love Lucy. He blinked — that slow, deliberate blink of someone processing absurdity — and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” His tone carried the weight of someone who’d spent years teaching kids about real history: wars with dates, legislation with consequences, dead presidents with marble monuments.

Not a redhead pratfalling through every frame.

But I loved that show, and even at eleven, I sensed something disruptive in Lucy Ricardo’s spectacular flops. When she stuffed chocolates in her mouth and bra on the assembly line, she wasn’t just being funny — she was making mistakes magnetic. When she schemed to get into Ricky’s nightclub act, she transformed ambition from something unseemly into something we could root for. The woman who couldn’t keep house or stay out of trouble somehow made it acceptable for women to want more than what they had.

So I did the project anyway. I argued that I Love Lucy rewrote the rules while pretending to enforce them: it smuggled pregnancy onto television by making Lucy’s condition the setup for slapstick. It placed an interracial marriage at the center of America’s living rooms, though it softened the edges by having Ricky be the perpetually exasperated straight man to Lucy’s mayhem. The show put a woman front and center, as the engine of every plot, even when those plots were about her failures.

I won the fair.

The win was nice. But what stuck with me was how easily he dismissed her — how quickly joy got tossed in the bin marked “frivolous.” He couldn’t see that revolutionaries sometimes wear polka-dot dresses and cry. That power doesn’t always announce itself with manifestos; sometimes it just makes you laugh until you forget you’re watching the world change.

I vowed never to trust anyone who misreads the costume for the performance.

Sometimes we’re allergic to taking funny women seriously.

If they’re beautiful, we assume they lack substance. If they’re messy, we pathologize them as unstable. If they’re loud, we exile them as “too much.” And if they make us laugh — if they’re sharp enough to hold a room hostage with their wit — we dismiss it as a party trick, a distraction from the “real” work.

Because somewhere deep in our collective unconscious, we still equate power with gravitas: tailored suits, mahogany podiums, a deep voice.

So when a woman walks into a room and makes it convulse with laughter, she breaks our understanding of how authority works.

But Lucille Ball understood exactly what to do with that confusion.

She seized it.

She wasn’t just the star of I Love Lucy — she was modifying television’s DNA while the medium was still learning to crawl. This wasn’t a woman stepping into a pre-made industry and playing by established rules. She was inventing the rules as she went.

Before Lucy and Desi Arnaz, sitcoms mimicked radio plays, with cameras awkwardly aimed at stage-bound actors. They weren’t shot with multiple cameras. They didn’t capture the electricity of live audiences. They didn’t rerun, meaning each episode died the moment it aired. The entire visual and rhythmic language of TV comedy — how it looked, how it moved, how it felt in your living room — was improved because she demanded something better.

And she did all this while making housewives across America howl in recognition.

On screen, she played a woman who always wanted more — more attention, more adventure, more agency in her own life. Lucy Ricardo schemed and stumbled and failed magnificently in front of the whole country, but she never stopped reaching. She wasn’t graceful or selfless or quietly accommodating. She was appetite in action. She wanted the spotlight and admitted it without shame, without the self-deprecating wink.

And America fell in love with her audacity.

Nearly three-quarters of all television owners in the country, eleven million people, tuned in each week to watch her misbehave. They scheduled their lives around her chaos. That wasn’t just popularity, that was gravitational pull.

But here’s what those millions of viewers didn’t see: while they laughed at Lucy Ricardo’s grape-stomping disasters and celebrity encounter embarrassments, Lucille Ball was in boardrooms across Hollywood, reading budgets, signing contracts, and making decisions that would shape American entertainment for decades.

When she took control of Desilu Productions in 1962, she didn’t just become the first woman to run a major television studio, she became the person who decided what America would watch next. The company was hemorrhaging money when she stepped in, its survival dependent on her willingness to risk her own fortune on shows other executives had written off.

She saved Star Trek when NBC wanted to cancel it. She green-lit Mission: Impossible when others saw only expensive props and complicated plots. She bankrolled The Untouchables when the subject matter seemed too dark for television.

The woman America knew as a lovable disaster was quietly financing the future of television, often as the only woman in rooms full of men who underestimated her because they’d seen her stuff chocolates in her mouth at an alarming rate.

She weaponized being underestimated.

She simply let them laugh at Lucy while Lucille built an empire in plain sight.

What she created — both on screen and behind the scenes — wasn’t just entertainment. It was permission.

Permission to be hungry for more than what you’ve been given.

Permission to fail and try again.

Permission to want the spotlight and reach for it with both hands.

And in all these ways, sixth-grade Caroline was absolutely correct: Lucille Ball and her creations changed America.

That history project still haunts me — not because I won, but because I almost believed the lie that joy isn’t serious business.

In a world obsessed with somber faces and heavy words, laughter is treated like fluff. Optional. Something that happens in the margins.

But laughter is rebellion. It slips past defenses that would reject direct confrontation. It makes the unbearable bearable. The impossible, possible.

At its core, laughter is love — the gift of lightness, a kind of offering. When Lucille Ball made people laugh, she wasn’t just entertaining them. She was loving them, one joke at a time.

She knew humor could be resistance and care at once. It could disarm and connect. It could change everything.

She wasn’t just funny — she was subversive.

So the next time someone tells you laughter isn’t serious, don’t bother arguing. Let them underestimate it. Let them miss its weight.

Meanwhile, you’ll be using it to build something they’ll never understand, let alone destroy.

That’s how legends are made — not by meeting someone else’s definition of importance, but by rewriting the terms entirely.

And I think that’s how you change the world.

If you made it this far, click that itty-bitty digital organ! ❤️