Abstract

I Love Lucy is considered to have been one of the most humorous television programs in the United States as early as the 1950s. This paper explores the use of language by the protagonists, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, in order to understand the source of the program’s humor. Linguistic analysis of the Ricardos’ speech is applied, and ideological implications are explored, in an attempt to explain how the humor of the program is acceptable to both English and Spanish speakers. Lucy and Ricky execute multilingual manipulation with one another in such a way that linguistically charged statements throughout the series do not insult viewers, and such interaction may be considered humorous for English and Spanish speakers alike. The question of why it is justifiable to laugh at such multilingual humor is explored by analyzing the frameworks of linguistic manipulation utilized by each of the Ricardos.

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