Just watched a couple of Lucy clips via Google and remembered how incredibly funny she could be. So, a little more about Lucille Ball on her 100th birthday.
This from American Masters (the beginning of their brief biography):
For more than thirty years, Lucille Ball was one of the most recognized and loved entertainers in the world. Known to all simply as Lucy, she portrayed a scatterbrained housewife with the ability to turn simple chores into unparalleled fiascoes. Clumsy and unsophisticated at nearly everything she tried (and she tried nearly everything), the television Lucy won the hearts of average Americans across all social and cultural lines with her wacky schemes. Ironically, it was Ball’s wide range of experience and talents that made her such a success in this role.
Dropping out of high school at the age of fifteen, Ball moved to New York to study acting and found her first stage work as a chorus girl in 1927. She had her first break as a poster-girl for Chesterfield cigarettes and soon found herself in tinsel town as one of twelve slave-girls in the Eddie Cantor film, Roman Candles (1933). By the mid-1930s, if you went to the movies (and in the 1930s everyone went to the movies) you would be certain to see Lucille Ball. Sometimes a nurse or a dancer, sometimes a flower clerk or a college girl, but always there. By the end of the decade she had been in forty-three films and was known as “Queen of the B Movies.”