This is definitely not true, and as to the nature of his personality, here are quotes from Wolcott Gibbs (“Just a hell of a nice guy”) and Brendan Gill (“easygoing and pacific”).Ĭonceptually, much of Addams’s humor is pretty much what all humor is about-combining associations from different frames that the logic of the joke reconciles, as in this 1936 cartoon, which finds Medusa in a beauty parlor.Īnd here is one from 1975 that combines the Greek myth of Laocoön, who was killed, along with his two sons, by two sea serpents, with a father, his sons, and sausages at a butcher shop.Īddams was one of the first to realize how much incongruity could be tolerated in a cartoon-how far apart the frames of reference (sausages = sea serpents?) could be and still work as a joke. Part of this myth is that he regularly checked himself into a mental hospital when the demons he created became his own.
Or you could consider him an auteur even of the cartoons whose ideas he did not directly come up with.Ī common myth about Addams is that because the fictional world of his cartoons was regularly inhabited by people and creatures who resembled sociopaths, he in some way shared these characteristics. Because Addams had created his own comic world of the bizarre and macabre, writing gags for him was fairly easy-sort of like writing for a sitcom. Interestingly, a number of my contemporaries-Arnie Levin, Sam Gross, and Mick Stevens-did supply gag ideas for Addams during those years, although he also created his own. Our paths crossed once and I shook the great man’s hand, which was largish, as was the rest of him. Addams did not work at The New Yorker offices, but came in occasionally to drop off his cartoons. I started cartooning for The New Yorker in 1977, and Addams died in 1988. How long and how well did you know Charles, as colleagues and friends? The links will take you to the cartoons as they appeared in our pages, via the digital edition.
I found my answers more interesting than I expected, and I hope you will, too.
Recently, I answered some questions about the cartoonist Charles Addams, posed in an e-mail by Patrick Healy of the New York Times, who was writing about the new “Addams Family” musical.
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