Ricky is the straight man, a character similar to Arnaz himself; he is a Cuban-American bandleader whose trademark song is "Babalu".

On August 6, 1948, Lucy and Ricky moved into an old reconverted brownstone apartment at 623 East 68th Street in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan.

Upon moving to the city, Ricky (referred to as Rick by Fred and sometimes by Ethel) ends up getting a job headlining the Tropicana where he and his band are held over indefinitely.

However, in spite of Ricky's reluctance and regular refusal to give her a role, Lucy sometimes finds a way into the show.

Finally, that evening, while Ricky is performing, Lucy pens a note and passes it to the maître d'hotel.

Ricky reads the note, which alludes to a wife needing to tell her husband they are having a baby, and requests that he sing a particular song.

Ricky, unaware that the "husband" mentioned in the note is himself, wants to bring the expectant couple up on stage to congratulate them.

Little Ricky grows on a season-by-season basis, and by the sixth season (1957), he has started school and learned to play the drums and speak Spanish.

While in Hollywood, Lucy meets many famous celebrities, including William Holden, Hedda Hopper, Rock Hudson, Cornel Wilde, Harpo Marx, Richard Widmark, Van Johnson and John Wayne.

Lucy is incredibly starstruck and saves anything that had come in contact with a celebrity, such as a can smashed by Cary Grant's left rear wheel.

Lucy's second foray into show business is when she replaces Johnson's sick redheaded partner in his act at the hotel.

She wants to impress her friend Carolyn Appleby and successfully coaxes Johnson give her the job through flattery.

Finally, she has her third shot at stardom when she appears with a Ricky Ricardo dummy at a luncheon for movie executives.

Lucy accepted on his behalf and schemed to build a dummy of Ricky and then pretend that he is ill, and she finishes the show herself.

Her plan does not go as well as she had hoped, but she is still a success, as the executives think the performance is meant to be a comedy act, and she is offered a contract.

Lucy misses the boat and has to be lowered to the deck of the cruise ship, the USS Constitution, from a helicopter.

They sail across the Atlantic, where Lucy has to settle for being partnered with a young boy to play games on deck but together they win a ping pong trophy.

Lucy and Ricky also make close friends while in Connecticut, Betty and Ralph Ramsey (the Ricardos' next door neighbors).

I Love Lucy and The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour concluded in the aftermath of Arnaz and Ball's real-life divorce in 1960, an incident that was not written into the script.

[citation needed] Arnaz only portrayed a similar Ricky Ricardo character once after The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour ended its run: in a recurring role on The Mothers-in-Law, Arnaz portrayed matador Raphael Delgado, with the same accent and personality as Ricky (as a Desilu production, The Mothers-in-Law used many of the same writers and executive staff as the Lucy shows).

The line is still often mentioned in articles about I Love Lucy[7] and even printed on official merchandise,[8] despite the fact that Ricky never says this sentence exactly this way.