Lucille Ball Yelled at the Studio Audience for Not Laughing at Desi Arnaz Jr.’s Sitcom Pilot
Before Dana Carvey made it big on Saturday Night Live — even before he co-starred with Mickey Rooney in the sitcom flop One of the Boys or as a helicopter cop in Blue Thunder — he filmed a pilot for a situation comedy that co-starred ultimate showbiz nepo baby Desi Arnaz Jr. The son of America’s favorite comedy couple, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, never duplicated his parents’ success despite his mother’s best efforts.
The pilot was called Whacked Out, Carvey told fellow SNL alum Chris Kattan on his Idiotically Speaking podcast. What was the sitcom about? That’s hard to say. One of the show’s writers blogged about his experience filming the pilot but neglected to mention his creation’s premise or plot, fixating on how starstruck he was in the presence of Ball.
In Carvey’s conversation with Kattan, the plot of Whacked Out was also of little concern. Instead, Carvey focused on what happened when he and Desi Jr. were bombing in front of the studio audience. “We hear a voice on the other side of the studio,” Carvey remembered before dropping his voice an octave to imitate Ball. “‘What’s wrong with you people? This is funny!’ And it was an older Lucille Ball. She had grabbed the mic from the warm-up guy and was admonishing the audience. ‘This is funny!’”
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Ball’s finger-wagging didn’t get any laughs, but it did bring production to a halt midway through the taping. The problem? “The whole audience wanted to get her autograph, so we had to hold tape for an hour,” Carvey laughed.
Network executives agreed with the bored audience, passing on Whacked Out and thwarting Desi Jr.’s latest attempt at the sitcom success that should have been his birthright. “Desi was a sweet guy,” Carvey says, “but he was not in a good place.”
While Ball has a stellar reputation as a comic actress and behind-the-scenes boss, she could lose her temper when things didn’t go her way. Martin Short got talk-show mileage out of the time she berated him for supposedly knocking her seat on an airline flight. “Look! You kicked the back of my GD chair 50 times!”
People knew to watch their toes on the I Love Lucy set as well, explained Keith Thibodeaux, the kid actor who played Little Ricky: “She was honest with people. If she liked you, you knew it. If she didn’t, you knew it also.”
“If something didn’t precisely align with her expectations, if a line was missed or a cue forgotten, she would reprimand, giving a sharp tap on the head coupled with a stern ‘Wake up, kid,’” Thibodeaux added in a Facts Verse video.
Others have also recalled Ball’s short fuse but chalk up the occasional sharp words to her exacting standards. “A lot of people found her very, very tough to work with. She bossed everybody around and didn’t spare anybody’s feelings,” said Tony Randall, who once appeared on Here’s Lucy. “I didn’t mind that because she knew what she was doing.”
Unfortunately, Desi Jr. couldn’t say the same.
