Zany Side-Characters
Looking at "My Fair Maid-y" and "Lucy Hires a Maid," The side characters Ethel and Karen have “orphic” responses to Lucy and Grace getting maids (Roach 90). Ethel’s is a predictable patronizing tone:
Ethel sarcastically emulates the “wench in waiting” trope whereas Karen calls back more specifically to the film All About Eve:“Oh pardon my answering the door dressed like this, your highness. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go put on a formal gown.”
Unlike Lucy or Ethel, Karen is very confrontational and corners April to access her. Both side-women support the firing of the domestic workers.
In the 1950s model, the women fear the working-class creature and come up with the scheme of trashing the apartment in order to avoid the direct confrontation of. Karen, on the other hand, would fire Porter in the time it takes to say vodka. She is wealthy and famously insensitive to lower class characters, less fashionable characters, and Grace who Karen views as both of those things. Karen is perhaps the most liberated character of Will & Grace but her analysis is not as necessary when looking at the intertextuality of the show.
Jack seems the least comparable to his Lucy model counterpart, Fred. But, they are both presented as funny men, not to be taken very seriously, and both have a focus on wanting money, specifically from the male leads. Jack gets his own storyline in this episode (posing as a lawyer – stealing Will’s office in order to secure a relationship with an intellectual type), which is fairly significant. Of course, he is made an absolute fool by the end of it, but that is who his character is. Battles and Hilton-Morrow argue that Jack “is infantilized by the more stable characters” in the show which undercuts the surface-level progress of an effeminate gay man on primetime, but in terms of intertextuality Fred is also minimalized and not a focus in “Lucy Gets a Maid” at all.
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- Chapter One - Lucy and Grace Fernando Rivera
