Actresses Exploiting Physical Comedy In Tradition Of Lucy

So far this season, Jennifer Aniston has tripped over airport furniture, a very pregnant Roseanne has gotten stuck in an oven hood, and Lea Thompson has sent salad flying across the room.

But Tea Leoni’s klutzy tabloid photographer on ABC’s “The Naked Truth” has one-upped them all.

“I can’t believe this. I’m living a bad ‘Lucy’ episode,” Leoni’s character, Nora Wilde, said as she posed as a room-service waiter to get a picture of a hot TV star.

“Hey, chicklet,” her cohort replied, “no such thing as a bad ‘Lucy’ episode.”

In other words, what’s funnier than a woman doing slapstick? This fall, TV producers have answered: not much.

With sophisticated banter the dominant form of comedy on television, women are at the heart of a creeping and contrary TV phenomenon: physical humor. It’s as if TV comediennes are suddenly being haunted by the spirit of Lucille Ball.

And no character is more Lucy-esque than Nora Wilde. In just a handful of outings, Nora has carried a mattress on her back, pulled her ex-husband’s hair, beaten his chest, crawled into a morgue drawer to take a picture of a dead celeb, climbed on top of a table to get a better look at Tom Hanks’ open fly and stuffed her bra with M&Ms.

And with women leading 10 of 27 new comedies, the presence of Lucy’s ghost isn’t limited to “The Naked Truth.” Witness Nancy McKeon traipsing around the Plaza Hotel in a terry cloth bathrobe on CBS’ “Can’t Hurry Love” or Pamela Reed mistaking an athlete’s cup for an oxygen mask on NBC’s “The Home Court.”

But unlike Lucy, who took her cues from vaudeville and Charlie Chaplin, today’s television comediennes mix their pratfalls with pithy dialogue.

“You can either be verbal or you can slip on banana peels, but comedies now are going for both,” says Robert J. Thompson, associate professor of television, radio and film at Syracuse University. “Now that everybody has to compete with ‘Friends,’ they have to be ‘Friends’ plus something. ‘The Naked Truth’ is ‘Friends’ plus more sight gags.”

So when the M&Ms fell out of Nora’s bra and onto the floor, she had a quip ready for her fellow photographers: “Help yourselves.”

To which Stupid Dave (Mark Roberts) replied, “I don’t like M&Ms. Whadaya got in your pants?”

That kind of verbal humor is at a peak these days, with such successful New York-based NBC comedies as “Mad About You” and “Seinfeld” getting noticed by the other networks. As a result, the standard scenario on most sitcoms is witty exchanges of dialogue - and not much action.

However, in trying to distinguish themselves from this emphasis on all banter, all the time, some shows have begun to incorporate more physical bits into their shtick. This strategy first surfaced last season when Ellen DeGeneres began transforming herself into a 1990s version of Lucy.

Her series, “Ellen,” which shares a network and Wednesday nights with “The Naked Truth,” was as talky as any NBC sitcom when it debuted in March 1994 as “These Friends of Mine.” But last fall, things on “Ellen” started getting wacky.

Even “Friends,” which has raised the discussion of minutiae to new heights, has gotten physical this year. The show’s producers have turned not-so-bright Daddy’s girl Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) into a pratfall queen.