This is a great and macabre taster of Charles Addams' humour. Guys, I only found out about the origin of the Addams Family a couple of weeks ago! I assumed the 90s film was their first appearance, little did I know that they already had reached a cult status through comic inserts in the New Yorker decades before that. I felt I needed to go and look at Addams' pictures. I seem to recall when I listened to this book many years ago, he mentioned Chas Addams. I'm reading a Ray Bradbury novel for Halloween - From the Dust Returned. And the fur coats and hats the ladies wore to go out! The old cars, the old stoves, the social tea parties, the apartments that look like The Honeymooners.
I've heard this is what they did in old houses prior to outlets being required on every wall. What I find fascinating, though, is the fact that the toaster, the coffee maker, and the waffle iron are all plugged into the light fixture overhead. For example, in one cartoon, a wife is rigging up wires to electrocute her husband at breakfast. I looked at the illustrations of rooms and houses and cars and clothes, once so commonplace but now distracting enough that they took preeminence over the jokes. I loved the fact they were written so long ago. (Now I'm thinking about Morticia, but this book of cartoons only has one "Addams Family" cartoon in it.) That made me wonder - was Chas Addams unhappily married? Looking at the bio in the book, his first two marriages seem as though they were beds of thorns, not beds of roses. Mainly I was entranced by the fact that the majority of the cartoons cover ways for wives to kill their husbands and husbands to kill their wives. There were a couple that were laugh out loud funny to me. They span several decades - the 1930s through the 1980s. This compilation of Charles Addams' cartoons contains many that were previously published in the New Yorker and some that were never published at all.
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