Lucille Ball Didn’t Think Early ‘I Love Lucy’ Episodes Were Funny

Lucille Ball wouldn’t be the first actor, comic or otherwise, to cringe while watching herself on screen. But Ball wasn’t universally opposed to watching her own work — it was a specific part of her sitcom portfolio that made her turn up her nose. 

“I don’t like some of the shows that I look at,” Ball told the Roanoke Times, as reported by MeTV. “Some of the old I Love Lucy’s are silly.”

I Love Lucy? The original classic sitcom? “I study them and enjoy them and wish I’d done it differently a lot of times — most of the time — but very few I really laugh at,” she explained.

The fact that early episodes didn’t live up to Ball’s funny standards shouldn’t be a surprise, given how quickly the show came together. According to her memoir, Love, Lucy, Ball was four months pregnant when CBS decided it wanted a pilot for a situation comedy starring her and Desi Arnaz. “You’ve got one month to put (a show) together,” said Ball’s agent, Don Sharpe. “They want the pilot by February 15th.”

Ball’s visible pregnancy was one problem. The complete lack of a script was another. Ball and Arnaz signed up writers from their radio show, My Favorite Husband, but because time was so crunched, they also reworked gags from their old vaudeville act to fill the time. To conceal her pregnancy, Ball did an old bit wearing a baggy-pants clown outfit. She spent the rest of the episode in a bathrobe and pajamas in another act of camouflage. Good enough to convince Phillip Morris to sponsor the show, but it was understandably not the couple’s finest hour.

Early shows also had one hand tied behind their backs, thanks to Arnaz basically inventing the three-camera sitcom. Live West Coast productions appeared blurry when transmitted to New York, so the couple figured out an innovative way to film live and ship the result. Over months, the process was streamlined into what became the sitcom standard, but it’s not hard to fathom why Ball might have been less satisfied with earlier efforts. 

At least Ball believed I Love Lucy got better as it went, and she enjoyed her later work as well. “The ones we made when we were just starting, they grate me a little. But I love the later shows. I love the ones I did with the kids — Here's Lucy — and I liked the ones where we moved up to Connecticut,” she told Roanoke Times. “Whatever they were called.”

Those shows were called I Love Lucy — the Connecticut episodes made up the last 13 episodes of the show’s sixth and final season.