Milton Berle Hides at the Ricardos
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour

Berle is wanted for a PTA benefit. He’s a very busy man, as Lucy discovers at his office. His publisher is there, a certain Watson, if the new book isn’t finished in a week, half the royalties will be forfeited (Lucy holds a copy of his new novel, Earthquake). A construction worker from a new skyscraper next door swings over on his cement bucket to get an autograph, and cracks wise. “You build the buildings,” says Berle, “and I’ll tell the jokes.” Two tumblers try out on the spot (“Somersault & Maugham”), Berle delightedly wheels them into his private office to work out a number. Lucy recommends her house in Westport for the solitude a writer needs.

Fred mistakes him for a lover, Ricky finds Mildred Berke, a flirtatious lady, after first mistakenly bopping Watson’s nose. Mildred is seen through and bopped.

The writer’s life is ultimately an image for Baudelaire’s clown. Berle hangs from the cement bucket, Lucy from his ankles and Ricky from her waist, all swaying twenty stories up.

But the other image has Ethel find a cigar, hat and coat in Lucy’s living room, and a rhythmic tapping and bells in the next room. Lucy puts on the hat and coat, smokes the cigar and dances.

The Ricardos Go to Japan
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour

A hole in the paper wall of their Tokyo hotel affords Lucy and Ethel a view of Bob Cummings in his Japanese bath. He’s a nice chap, shows them a pearl necklace and camera he’s bought from Mr. Osato at a price not to be beat.

Lucy rifles Fred’s money belt with Ethel’s help to make a purchase that will let her recoup her investment back in the States and keep a pearl necklace for her own. She gets the money, but Fred turns in his sleep and she is propelled into a fishtank in the floor beside his tatami.

Next morning, he announces his intention to buy a new money belt, by reason of his own having shrunk. The plan is off, she returns the pearls to Cummings but the wrong ones, her $2.98 strand of imitations. He is at the Toma Geisha House, where Mr. Osato is regaling Ricky and Fred as well, who are supposed to be at a baseball game.

“This beats going to a ball game all hollow,” opines Fred. Ricky sings “Tokyo Pete” in Japanese to the accompaniment of flute, drum and shamisen. Lucy and Ethel are ushered in by the matron to serve refreshments, which include fried grasshoppers (inago). They are wearing kimono and wigs as geisha, Lucy joins the fan dance and the parasol dance, then topples the table to switch pearls with Cummings underneath it. Ricky decides he’ll buy a necklace for Lucy, whose samurai exit through the wall is occasioned by a deep bow that doffs her wig.

The boys are berated for misleading the girls, but a necklace each smoothes things over.

Arnaz’s direction is remarkable for the speed of the fishtank and table gags, for its record of the dances, and for a long shot of the geisha house interior from one corner that gives an admirable view, among other things.

Lucy Meets the Mustache
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour

Variety, a fairly constant feature on the shows, failed to find a single guffaw, although the funniest joke ever is here. Lucy is disguised as Ernie Kovacs’ chauffeur Crandall, who is British and wears a mustache. Her idea is to drive Kovacs in his limousine, a spiffy white sort of landau, to his sponsor’s country club for the weekend. Kovacs has hired Little Ricky for his show, he plays the drums like Gene Krupa, she wants Ricky on the show as well. The disguise is necessary for two reasons. Tricky Little Ricky, whose “melting” spoon gave Fred a start over coffee, put some exploding cigars in the living room and Lucy filled Kovacs’ cigar case with them as a courtesy when he left it behind after coffee and entertainment. One of them, as Edie Adams says, “almost blew off his mustache”. Her earlier attempt at a meeting failed because he was grouchily shaving in the kitchen with a straight razor and a teakettle before a small standing mirror with the plumbing out, and he nearly “cut his own throat” when her purse became entangled in his suspenders. But Kovacs and Ricky have met on the train to Westport and naturally made an arrangement. Adams spills the beans about Lucy’s disguise to Kovacs on his car phone, he and Ricky decide on a little amusement. At the country club, she tries to excuse herself from sleeping in their room, Crandall has a date. A married man, with six children? “Don’t tell me,” says Ricky, “you have to make a date with your own wife.” Lucy, in livery with driving cap and gloves, mustache and a husky voice with an accent, tells him, “ever since the sixth child she’s been very formal.”

At the coffee, Kovacs entertains with a large pad of drawing paper on an easel. He draws a table lamp and lights it, then an “ICE-A-BOX” that gives real ice.