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Matt Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Pete Fenzel map the branches of the Addams Family Tree. We start at the beginning with Charles Addams’s single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker, move through the classic TV show and legendary 90s movies, to the 2019 animated film and the Netflix comedy Wednesday. With a special focus on perhaps the franchise’s greatest single work, the 1993 comedy Addams Family Values, we focus on the inverted relationships between the Addamses and historical ideas of American sociopolitical norms and myths, spun in jokes and in horrors and modes of marginalization. From futile efforts to guillotine a baby to a murderous takedown of the First Thanksgiving, the Addams lampoon and problematize harm and harmlessness in human experience. Do they have superpowers? Are they really killers? What is Uncle Fester’s marriage saying about intimate partner abuse? What is the deal with the disembodied hand; is Thing enslaved? Is Thing happy? Is it all ookiness, set up and punchline, or, in the model of Gomez and Morticia, might it be the greater virtue to behold the horrors of the world, and, with them in full view, embrace duty and love? Plus, the obligatory Raul Julia appreciation that must be echoed whenever encountering the work of the legend.

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Further Reading

• The Hidden Message of Addams Family Values by Simon Abrams in The Hollywood Reporter
• Charles Addams ‘33: From Broad St. to Broadway, by Rebecca Downing, on the Colgate University 200th anniversary site, 2019
• Charles Addams: The Dark Side of Humor, by Robert Mankoff, in The New Yorker
• The Addams Family (2019), in The Addams Family wiki
• 10 Funniest Addams Family Comics Starring Gomez & Morticia (From the Original Comic Strip), by Casey Connor on Screen Rant
• Fear of Spiders May Have Its Evolutionary Roots in Aversion to Scorpions, by Emma Young in the British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Showbizads Press Reel for the 1992 Broadway Revival of Man of La Mancha starring Raul Julia and Sheena Easton on YouTube