TV

Iconic Lucille Bluth Moments That Confirm Jessica Walter Is A Comedy Icon

“If that’s a veiled criticism about me, I won’t hear it and I won’t respond to it.”

by Patrick Lenton  26 March 2021
Jessica Walter Lucille Bluth

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Actress and legend Jessica Walter has died at the age of 80. Her IMDB is stacked with roles going back to the early sixties, but it’s her career defining role as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development which most people will remember her from.

The thing about Jessica Walter’s stint as Lucille, the acidic, dried up matriarch of the dysfunctional Bluth family, is that she defined the show and its humour. She is the show’s withered beating comedy heart — it’s not easy to play a character with almost no redeeming qualities, as both exceptionally funny and not as a villain. In the show’s pilot, some of her first lines are a rant about homosexuals ruining a party she organised, which immediately establishes her as a “bad” person. But then somehow, impossibly, she rescues it:

“Everything they do is so dramatic and flamboyant,” she says, lips pursed and eyes narrowed. “It just makes me want to set myself on fire.”

Somehow she is able to tread the narrow line between making a joke out of others and being the joke herself, and it’s all in Jessica Walter’s perfect delivery.

In other hands, she could have been played as monstrous, as a joke — but Jessica Walter managed to make the world’s most entitled woman… hilariously relevant, if not likeable.

It’s so impressive, especially for an actress who was better known for working soap and mystery roles, than her comedy chops initially.

Since her death, the internet has been sharing their favourite Jessica Walter as Lucille Bluth moments, and even despite the awful times she had on set due to Jeffrey Tambor, her time as Lucille Bluth deserves to be remembered in comedy legend.

Here’s some of the most iconic Lucille Bluth moments. Vale Jessica Walter.

“They don’t allow you to have bees in here”

So much of Arrested Development‘s style of humour is about moments of true absurdity being highlighted or underlined by a character’s response. Gob with a jar of bees is already funny — Lucille shaking her head and archly saying “they don’t allow you to have bees in here” is god tier comedy.

“I’ll be in the hospital bar.”

Michael: “Uh, you know there isn’t a hospital bar, mother.”

“Well, this is why people hate hospitals.”

Great! A very funny line that sells you a lot about Lucille Bluth. But the way she laughs in character at her own joke, and then continues to laugh off screen, on and on… now that’s very funny.

“It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, 10 dollars?”

This gag is comedy royalty, and has been used to exemplify moments of class and wealth blindness for years now.