Madelyn Pugh Davis, Writer for ‘I Love Lucy,’ Dies at 90

[joeybee12]

Shit...last of the group...brilliant writer. RIP

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/arts/television/madel...

Madelyn Pugh Davis, who with her writing partners for the classic sitcom “I Love Lucy” concocted zany scenes in which the harebrained Lucy dangles from a hotel balcony, poses as a sculpture or stomps and wrestles in a vat full of grapes, died Wednesday at her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. She was 90.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Michael Quinn Martin.

Clever turns of the phrase were not grist for the comedy mill that Ms. Davis, along with Bob Carroll Jr. and the producer Jess Oppenheimer, began running out of a studio back office in 1951. With Ms. Davis clacking away at the typewriter and her partners pacing around her, the basic premise was to come up with ludicrous physical predicaments for the show’s star, Lucille Ball, to get herself into — to the eternal consternation of her husband, played by her real-life husband, the bandleader Desi Arnaz, who was also one of the show’s producers. Lucy would be plopped in a bucket of cement, scampering about a bull ring, coated by ice after being locked in a meat freezer — all of which she escaped with clownish glee. In one famous scene, Lucy’s oversized bread loaf swells from the oven and backs her across her kitchen. In another, she guzzles a 46-proof health tonic, Vitameatavegamin, in a commercial, and is soon mumbling and stumbling.

Visual comedy is what the team, joined by Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf 1n 1955, considered their playful work. “We weren’t doing joke jokes or funny word jokes as much as we were setting up physical situations for her,” Ms. Davis said in a 1993 interview for the Archive of American Television. Often it was Ms. Davis who first rode a unicycle or tried out other stunts to see if they would work for Ms. Ball.