Just as a quick aside. I had never heard of “I Love Lucy” until after I left Cuba, but once I heard about it in Canada I watched just about every episode. And I have to say that Desi Arnaz got away with some swearing in Spanish! He would say things like:
“¡Si esta mujer me sigue jodiendo la voy a tener que matar!”
translated:
“If this woman keeps f*ing with me I’m going to have to kill her!”
And there were “carajos” (hell), and “coños” (p*ssy), all over the place too.
I think this is really the key. This can be seen in a lot of other examples, for example Ralph Kramden offering to send Alice “to the moon,” (even though unlike Ricky, Ralph would never actually do it and if he did Alice would undoubtedly sock him back). On the flip side, in the comics Maggie regularly worked over Jiggs and put him in bandages in Bringing up Father.
This extended to other things besides marriage. It was assumed that the cops might sometimes take a troublemaker out back and work him over, or that an NCO might physically discipline a recalcitrant recruit (witness Sarge and Beetle Bailey, although he rather archaically still does it today).
Interesting! I haven’t watched it much since I learned how to curse in Spanish, so I hadn’t noticed that. But those particular words come across as much milder in Spanish than they do in English.
For example, carajo literally means “prick,” but as you indicate it has more the force of “hell” in English.
This goes back much farther than I Love Lucy. Specifically, it goes back to the Hays Code that reined in the movies starting in 1932.
The intended effect of the Hays Code was to cut down on the overt display of sexuality evident in the early years of sound movies. (It had numerous other clauses as well, but they’re not as relevant.) Movies couldn’t show skin, or people in bed, or even much physical contact between the sexes.
Then as now, however, nobody objected in the same way to violence. Today, certain sexual scenes will get an NC-17 rating while violence against women rates only an R. (Check out the documentary This Movie Is Not Yet Rated.)
The screenwriters knew this instinctively. When they developed the screwball comedy genre they deliberately sublimated sex to violence. The couples that everybody knew were meant for one another in the end battled their way through the entire picture, yelling, screaming, spanking, hitting, kicking, spitting, pushing, tussling.
Audiences understood the code perfectly well. The louder and more physical the interaction was in the early part of the movie, the more passionate they could imagine the sex that would occur after the credits rolled.
Lucy and Desi were squarely in this tradition. They were a married couple but had to sleep in separate beds and couldn’t use the word “pregnant” no matter how large Lucy’s belly grew. So how to show how much they loved each other? By using language that everyone in the country had seen continually for the past twenty years. Desi’s spankings of Lucy were the equivalent of him fucking her. If Lucy couldn’t sit down afterward, it was because she was so sore from the pounding of his massive cock. Every adult understood this, and the kids just saw the comedy of an adult being treated like a child. Win-win.
You still see vestiges of this past today in screwball comedies, but that’s mostly homage because there’s no good reason not to have the couples together from the beginning. Violence as sublimated sex began to go away in films of the 60s, as soon as the Code was jettisoned. It never will entirely disappear, because the pictorial symbolism is too good to pass up, but its use has changed drastically.
This isn’t my theory, BTW. Read any good book about 30s screwball comedies and you’ll find this.
You know, this really does depend on where you’re from. My Dominican wife really got me in the coño habit.
Eh… true, but not what I meant to say. My wife really got me in the habit of saying coño; as a Dominican, it’s a mild word to her. I have gotten raised eyebrows from Salvadorans and Mexicans on its use.
Of the word. On my use of the word, that is. Not, you know… my use of…
Never mind. You get the idea.
I agree with this interpretation.
And to expand a bit more - I think the Desi/Lucy spankings weren’t just a metaphor for sex. Maybe spankings were, in the 50’s just as they are today, a part of some couples’ (including Ricky and Lucy’s, apparently), sexual repertoire.
At the risk of giving TMI, spanking play is part of the sexual menu in the Homie house. A few smacks on the ass ups the ante, if done right, but in no way do I or Mrs. Homie belive that she is accountable to my firm hand for her actions.
Oh great. There goes my day!
No wonder Desi drank too much.
Lucille bawls?
I always thought these were done in homage to the Vaudeville and greatest American female comedienne: Fanny Brice. Her most famous character was known as “Baby Snooks”. You might recall Red Skelton had a similar character, “The Mean Widdle Kid”
I think the theory of “violence as a substitute for sex” breaks down with obvious examples like the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello, unless you want to argue the screenwriters were really referring to gay sex.
Slapstick predates the Hayes Code by quite some time. Hell, even Chaplin used to kick other men in the butt. And while Chaplin was clearly conscious of homosexuality, I seriously doubt kicking Eric Campbell meant he preferred him to Edna Purviance.
Ultimately, it all boils down to the O’Donoghue* Principle: Most humor is based on pain and humiliation. If you spank someone, you get both.
*Portrayed by Michael O’Donoghue.
There’s no way to defend the proposition that all comic violence is identical or signifies identically, to drop into academese for a moment.
When a man and a women who are destined to go to bed together get physical with one another, it ain’t slapstick. Unless they swing that way. 
Some people who should know better in this thread are extending the “it was OK to beat women’ in the 50’s and 60’s because ILL portrayed casual violence against Lucy as a just punishment” theme way past where it belongs in the context of comedy and the time.
It was NOT OK to ‘beat’ women in the 50’s and 60’s, and men who did this routinely had their wives (and children) leave them, or her relatives would step in and put a clamp on that behavior. Men who did this also tended to be shunned by their friends and associates. Being a wife/woman beater was seen as being the lowest of the low.
Even without the formal social and legal infrastructures set up to deal with domestic violence which we have today, the 50’s and 60’s were not some noir novel. A middle class man slapping his wife at a Christmas party in the 50’s and 60’s would have been a shocking act in polite society and he wouldn’t have gotten any more of a pass among his social peers for doing it then than he would now.
Unless the woman was into it I would imagine the IRL number of “spankings” delivered to grown, adult women were pretty damn low. People seem to have this bizarre notion that all the women in the 50’s and 60’s were infantalized children based on TV and magazine advertising. They weren’t, and their husbands typically weren’t people who thought it would be useful to spank an adult woman. If people in the year 2060 judge us on Seinfeld or some other sitcom we’re not going to come off too well.
Many women still do (well, at least in TVLand), however I don’t think that’s what prompted the social revolution of the 60s and 70s.
Alice Cramden didn’t take a lot of shit from Ralph in The Honeymooners and that was about the same era. And Ralph was constantly threatening to “send her to the moon”.
This has always been a point that I have found odd in some feminist tracts. The authors go on at length about the “obvious” male-on-female violence in The Honeymooners, yet Alice was clearly not cowed by Ralph’s bluster. If anything, Ralph’s “One of these days, Alice: POW! right to the moon!” indicated Ralph’s utter incapacity to actually inflict violence on Alice. It was clearly an utterly empty threat that Alice inevitably ignored or met with a steady, bored expression that said (more, even, than whatever line she next uttered), “Are you through with your tantrum, now? Can we address the real issue?” The idea that his bluster indicated genuine viloence in that home was ludicrous.
= = =
Regarding I Love Lucy, I suspect that the humor played very much on the perception (stereotype) of middle class white America that Cuban or Hispanic men routinely spanked their wives. (That joke or plot device appears in a number of stories and movies throughout the 20th century when told of any culture of Mediterranean origin.)
Violence against women was NOT accepted as normal. It was too often tolerated as being the business of the couple in which neighbors were not to interfere, but it was not considered appropriate behavior. On the street where I grew up, there was one guy who abused his wife. (I have no idea whether he ever struck her, but he screamed obscenities at her a lot and everyone in the neighborhood heard him.) He was a pariah. Some kids were not allowed to go to their house to play. He was never invited to social functions. And there was a lot of talk about how nasty he was and how unfortunate she was. The response was inadequate, but it was not accepting.
Maybe. But it’s more likely that spanking was a “comic” trope that existed throughout the culture.
Take a look at the Chase & Sanborn ad halfway down this page.
Or this Van Heusen shirt ad.
Or this page that lists 27 publicity stills for movies that have a man spanking a woman.
None of these would have dared put a Hispanic man into the picture.
Real men spanked women. And boys. There are a remarkable number of ads in which boys are punished by spanking for various misdeeds, the most amazing of which is probably this ad for Interwoven “socks”.
There’s a real question whether a spanking was considered violence, either toward women or children. Remember that parents were *expected * to spank their children when they got out of line, and the pervasive infantilism of women would have afforded them the same treatment. *Beating * a women may have been considered over the line. Spanking? Maybe not.
Maybe even beating isn’t that big a deal… Check out the Pitney-Bowes ad in this sexist collection.
Aside from spanking, there are plenty of scenes and episodes that revolve around her acting submissive towards him, calling him “sir”, when he’s telling her off for one thing or another. He punishes her by taking away her allowance or making her do humiliating things.
But then, I always figured it was a sitcom, and thus supposed to be an exaggerated and satiric portrayal of real life.
I had often heard that he was “heavy handed” in real life though never abusive. There’s no doubt they had a fiery relationship, and I recall her laughing off accusations of overt abuse saying he was just a “hot headed latin”. In that way, his behavior towards her in the show has a ring of truth to it.
