The 1950s was obsessed with marriage and reproduction. Movies, tv programs, presidential speeches, school textbooks, and Sunday morning sermons all pushed the heterosexual nuclear family with salary-man dad and cake-baking mom as the pinnacle of societal perfection, not only the way everyone should live but the way everyone did live (In the U.S., anyway). But there were critiques, carefully-worded inquiries about whether everyone in every nuclear family was by definition deliriously happy, and every single person by definition miserable.
Cartoonist Charles Addams offered one of the most popular critiques. He began publishing macabre cartoons in
The New Yorker in the 1930s. By the late 1940s, most were gently skewing the nuclear family experience.
On Christmas morning, two kids play gleefully with a guillotine. Or they start a fire in the fireplace in anticipation of Santa Claus's visit.
A boy brings models his scout uniform, while his disgusted parents look on. "He certainly doesn't take after my family," the mother exclaims.
A woman dressed in a black shroud dissects the mania for civic holidays: "I couldn't make it Friday -- I've so many things to do. It's the thirteenth, you know."
Addams never intended for his unnamed characters to be taken as a single macabre family, but they appeared together so often, and in so many different contexts, that readers assumed that they were related. Eventually he gave in and called them the Addams Family.
During the monster mania of the early 1960s, they spun off into a tv series,
The Addams Family (1964-66). Now they had names: Gomez (
John Astin), Morticia (Caroline Jones), their children Wednesday and Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, their butler Lurch, and "It," a sentient hand. They were not quite as homicidal as their counterparts in the
New Yorker cartoons; indeed, many episodes involved them helping neighbors, friends, or strangers with their personal problems. They were as close-knit and supportive, and as aggressive in promoting heterosexual romance, as any sitcom family of the 1960s. But still, they constantly blurred the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal," making them a favorite of gay kids who felt "different."
By the way, if you remember the series, you might be interested in seeing Ted Cassidy, who played the Frankenstein-like butler Lurch, in a swimsuit (top photo). Apparently he was quite a hunk.
There's a story about one of the cast members on
Gay Celebrity Dating Stories
Ted Cassidy, was 6'9'' played basketball, football and was lifeguard. The photo you posted shows him surrounded by other cute hunky lifeguards. His height got him typecast as monsters and freaks. He did have a good body just look for the photo in which is he fighting Paul Newman.
ReplyDeleteStruck me as more of an 80s obsession. In the 70s and 80s, people were obsessed with remembering the 50s incorrectly. A lot of this were the boomers, who were naïve to current events at the time.
ReplyDeleteSo, you had things that were largely irrelevant blown out of proportion and cast as heroes or villains depending on your agenda, (The John Birch Society was much more influential in the Reagan years but was a punchline in the 50s, and McCarthy was unanimously censured and drank himself to death.), associated with but by no means exclusive to the 1950s (Segregation began when Reconstruction ended, and those wily devils are still finding new ways to get around laws abolishing it.), or seen as why the 1950s were so prosperous (Pretty much every bad thing about earlier times still has its champions.).
It still happens, by the way. I know plenty of people who think "no black people" was part of the Comics Code; in reality, the whiteness of the Big Two before Sam Wilson's introduction was part of selling books in the South.
Ah, nostalgia. Hindsight is definitely not 20/20.
Nostalgia is a result of selective memory
DeleteI think of The Addams Family, The Munsters, comics' Tales of Bizarro World, et all, as a genre I like to call 'Lookit The Weirdos!'. The humor tended to center on these freakish people who... Gasp!... have different manners and customs than 'normal' people. Occasionally, the trope was subverted; not only were the Addamses happier and kinder than their petty, small-minded neighbors, but they usually came out on top.
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