Beliefs
Arnaz and Ball decided that the show would maintain what Arnaz termed "basic good taste", and were therefore determined to avoid ethnic jokes as well as humor based on handicaps, mental disabilities, and so on. Arnaz recalled that the only exception consisted of making fun of Ricky Ricardo's accent, and noted that even these jokes worked only when Lucy, as his wife, did the mimicking.
Arnaz was patriotic. In his memoirs, speaking of the United States, he wrote: "I know of no other country in the world" in which "a sixteen-year-old kid, broke and unable to speak the language" could achieve the successes he had. Over the show's nine-year run, the fortunes of the Ricardos mirror that of the archetypal 1950s American Dream. At first, they lived in a tiny, if pleasant brownstone apartment. Later, Ricardo got his big chance and moved, temporarily, to a fashionable hotel suite in Hollywood. Shortly after returning to New York, they had the opportunity to travel to Europe. Finally, the couple moved into a house in wealthy Westport, Connecticut.
Read more about this topic: Desi Arnaz
Famous quotes containing the word beliefs:
“We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)