I love Lucy. You love Lucy. We all love Lucy. But why has I Love Lucy stood the test of time — 50 years on Monday — while thousands of sitcoms have come and gone? Three words: It's still funny.

        No, I Love Lucy is still laugh-out-loud funny.

        Wrapping candy on an assembly line, stomping grapes, selling “Vitameatavegamin,” setting her nose on fire, ruining her husband's night club act — few performers compare to the hilarious, child-like comic genius of Lucille Ball.

        I Love Lucy endures as TV's great situation comedy because of the outstanding cast (husband Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo, and William Frawley and Vivian Vance as neighbors Fred and Ethel Mertz) and the foresight to film the show in front of a studio audience, one of the first programs to do so.

        Those high-quality black-and-white reruns have aired continuously for 50 years, entertaining the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original audience — even in these days of flashy color computer-generated special effects.

50 years to the minute

        “There are very few things on TV that you really laugh out loud at,” says writer Madelyn Pugh Davis, who with Bob Carroll Jr. crafted many of Lucille Ball's classic I Love Lucy scenes.

TOP 10 'LUCY' EPISODES

Critic John Kiesewetter's Top 10 I Love Lucy shows this week on TV Land:   • “The Girls Want to Go to a Night Club.” Series debut on Oct. 15, 1951. (9 p.m. Monday)   • “Pioneer Women.” Lucy makes a 10-foot loaf of bread. (8 p.m. Tuesday)   • “Lucy Does a TV Commercial.” Selling “Vitameatavegamin.” (9:30 p.m. Tuesday)   • “Job Switching.” Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate factory assembly line. (11 p.m. Tuesday)   • “Lucy Goes to the Hospital.” This is it! Lucy has a baby son on Jan. 9, 1953. (late Tuesday/midnight Wednesday)   • “Lucy Tells the Truth.” Ricky bets that Lucy can't be totally honest for 24 hours. (9:30 p.m. Wednesday)   • “L.A. at Last.” Lucy's fake nose catches fire. (9 p.m. Thursday)   • “Harpo Marx.” Lucy and Harpo re-create the Duck Soup mirror scene. (10:30 p.m. Thursday)   • “Lucy Visits Grauman's.” Lucy steals John Wayne's cement footprints. (11 p.m,. Thursday)   • “Lucy's Italian Movie.” The famous grape stomp. (9 p.m. Friday)

        Ms. Ball, who died in 1989, trusted the writing team who had joined her 1948 CBS radio comedy, My Favorite Husband. They provided the crazy antics for wacky housewife Lucy Ricardo, her handsome Cuban bandleader husband and her bickering neighbors.

        At 9 p.m. Monday, TV Land viewers will see the first I Love Lucy at the exact minute it premiered a half century ago. From the very beginning, Lucy and Ethel are scheming together, posing as hillbilly women to teach their husbands a lesson. Lucy appears with her front teeth blacked out and carrying a moonshiner's jug.

        “She never minded looking awful, blacking out her teeth, getting hit with mud,” says Ms. Pugh Davis, an Indianapolis native. “She never minded, and that gave us a wonderful license. We could just think of anything, because she would do it.”

        “Once we told her what to do, or showed her, she was magnificent,” says Mr. Carroll, who with Ms. Pugh Davis wrote for all of Ms. Ball's series: I Love Lucy (1951-57), The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (1957-60), The Lucy Show (1962-68), Here's Lucy (1968-74)and her short-lived comeback, Life with Lucy (1986).

        “By film time, she had done a great job of interpreting it. She was marvelous,” he says.

Improvising bits

        The writers came up with all kinds of crazy stuff for Lucy Ricardo. Sometimes they “worked backwards,” Ms. Pugh Davis says, building a story line around a great sight gag.

        When they saw a chef twirling a pizza, they stole the idea for Lucy. They had confidence that Ms. Ball could toss the dough in the air and have it land on her head, so she could hide from Ricky.

        Ms. Ball ad-libbed the final brilliant twist: After the pizza plopped over her face, “she made two little holes for her eyes,” says Ms. Pugh Davis, who often tested the gags in the writers' office before submitting the script to the versatile star.

        When the writers needed a job for Lucy in the 1952 second-season opener, they thumbed through the newspaper and saw a candy plant help-wanted ad.

        “Madelyn went down to the Farmer's Market, saw a lady doing candy and went back and said, "Good. Let's do candy.' It was just a fluke,” Mr. Carroll recalls.

        When they heard the Ricardos were headed to Italy in 1956, they determined that people still pressed grapes with their feet in rural areas. But Lucy's clowning again enhanced their script, as she traded shoves with a woman in the grape vat. “They fought more than we expected they would,” Ms. Pugh Davis says.

Not really an accident

        Ms. Pugh Davis says her favorite episode was the 1957 show in which Lucy's fake puddy nose catches on fire while lighting a cigarette near actor William Holden. (The sitcom was sponsored by Phillip Morris.) That joke was scripted, although Ms. Ball later claimed it was an accident.

        “She got to going on talk shows and saying that it was an accident, because it made a better story. She said, "And the flame went up, and Bill Holden almost fainted!'

        “But Bill Holden was trying not to laugh out loud! When she set fire to her nose, everyone fell over laughing,” the writer recalls. As Ricky would say: “Lucy, you've got some 'splaining in do!”

        The script called for Lucy to remove the fake nose and douse it in her coffee. Again the irrepressible redhead improvised.

        “Instead, she put her nose in the cup like a bird. It was really funny,” she says.

        The tongue-twister “Vitameatavegamin” TV commercial — the all-time favorite Lucy according to TV Land and TV Guide — displayed another one of her comedic gifts. She did multiple takes of the drunken Vitameatavegamin spiel from memory.

        “They didn't have any cue cards in those days. She learned all that, and I don't know how. I couldn't!” Ms. Pugh Davis says.

        We love Lucy, too, because Ms. Ball had an impeccable intuition.

        “Some comics overdo it, they go too far. She never did,” Ms. Pugh Davis says. “You watch. She never overdid the comedy, never went one too many. Never. And it was instinct. I never noticed at the time. I just took it for granted.”

A fateful decision

        Today we take reruns for granted. But we stilllove Lucy because of the radical decisions in 1951 that revolutionized the TV industry:

        • I Love Lucy was shot with three cameras simultaneously, copying a couple of popular game shows: Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life and Ralph Edwards Truth or Consequences. The three-camera format has been a sitcom staple ever since.

        • Ms. Ball and Mr. Arnaz refused to do the sitcom live from New York and insisted on filming the show in Los Angeles. When the show hit No. 3 the first season, and No. 1 the next three years, it proved that TV didn't have to be broadcast live from the East Coast — and started a production exodus to Hollywood movie studios.

        • Mr. Arnaz volunteered to pay the additional expense to produce the show on film in 1951, years before the use of videotape. (Most shows at the time relied on “kinescopes,” grainy films shot from a TV screen.)In exchange, CBS let him keep the negatives, which made 50 years of reruns possible.

        Nobody back then thought TV reruns would be of much value. I Love Lucy writers cranked out 39 episodes a season, compared to 22 episodes for most sitcoms today.

        Nobody back then imagined that entire channels, like TV Land, would be devoted to reruns.

        “We didn't put any reruns in (the schedule) because they said, "Well, who would look at something if they've seen it before?' ” Ms. Pugh Davis says.

        She never dreamed that Desi and Lucy's little show would entertain generations of TV viewers. “It's amazing to us,” says the writer, who watches Lucy reruns on cable.

        But she has no doubts why we love Lucy: “It's really funny.”

        Yes, TV's greatest comedy can be summed up in three words: I Love Lucy.

        E-mail jkiesewetter@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/kiese

        'I Love Lucy' trivia

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