![]() ![]() Addams’s surreal juxtapositions made horror hilarious. They poured boiling oil on Christmas carollers they asked their neighbors for a cup of cyanide their idea of child’s play was to roll boulders onto passing cars. “The tasty little family”-as the first editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, called them-were figures of startling caprice, grotesques inhabiting a bourgeois world while taking revenge on its suffocating decency. His po-faced characters never explained themselves their behavior allowed us to connect the dots of their perversity. His game was to turn values upside down: bad was good ugly was beautiful freaky was normal the deadly gave life. Into innocent lives dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, Addams’s creepy crew injected a dose of gleeful dread. ![]() Illustration by Robert RiskoĪround 1938, the genial, suburban cartoonist Charles Addams invented in these pages a ghoulish tribe of sadists and malcontents, intended to tease the notion of American prosperity and the cult of the perfect nuclear family. Gargoyles on Broadway: Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, as Gomez and Morticia, head the creepy clan in this adaptation. ![]()
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