Mellencamp response Marina Massidda

 

Reading Mellencamp’s descriptions of Lucille Ball’s comedy as physical, I find myself asking why she in particular can pull it off, and how her appropriation of this typically male comic genre relates to her femininity.  Without having researched this in depth, I surmise that part of the appeal of slapstick relates to mens’ spontaneous departure from the rigid body of the “straight man.” What kind of body do Lucy’s antics subvert? No doubt the docile and obedient body, as evidenced by her escapades which Mellencamp discusses at length, but I am interested in her slapstick on a closer scale. Mellencamp describes one sequence,

“Lucy trains as a ballet dancer in one of her characteristic performances: dressed in a frothy tutu, she eagerly and maniacally imitates a dancer performing ballet movements which she then transforms through automatic, exaggerated repetition into a charleston. Whenever Lucy is confident that she has learned something new, no matter how difficult, she gets carried away”(89). 

It can’t be that she’s behaving like a man, because that never gets the comic reception that men behaving like women do. But her lapse into the charleston rather than being ridiculous by itself renders the attempt at ballet ridiculous, renders the attempt at femininity to be a ridiculous and unsustainable charade.  So we’re not laughing at the departure from femininity, or at femininity in an essential sense, but at femininity in the constructed sense. Reading the piece it seems that while none of Lucy’s escapades take, making her domestic confinement flexible but secure, these rebellions don’t just break from her objective duties as a housewife but as a character who understands that she must break now and again. For the TV audience, it seems significant that a collective response encodes a shared understanding: we know this is so ridiculous right? Not the joke, but the part that’s usually not a joke at all.