There must be a special reason why Americans find Addams's stuff refreshing. Perhaps it is because the cartoons, which deal largely with family life, provide a healthy antidote to the saccharine treatment of the same subject in our advertisements and other forms of mass culture. After the depressingly cheerful families of the beer ads, the pious celebrations of marital bliss on the radio, the sentimental gushing over the kiddies everywhere except in the home, it is wonderfully relaxing to see these themes treated with a reverse twist, a bend sinister. Addams works this profitable vein with great diligence.

He also, of course, exploits the American public's peculiar, and in some ways rather frightening, fascination with violence. Just as the detective story, once an exercise in rational deduction, has become a pretext for the intimate description of extreme violence, just as the so-called comic books have more and more gone in for the gruesome and the sadistic, so there is a certain significance in the rise of Addams as the most popular and distinctive of the cartoonists whose work appears regularly in the New Yorker. (p. 37)

Callousness is not funny, but it becomes so when carried to the pitch of the matron in flowered bathing suit running along the beach and shouting up at her husband, who, as the shadow on the sand all too clearly reveals, is being carried off by a huge bird of prey: "George! George! Drop the keys!" Even an auto-da-fé becomes comic when we see a stolid householder reflectively puffing on his pipe as he rakes the autumn leaves on his lawn into a neat pile around the feet of his plump and indignant spouse, bound firmly to a tree. The contrast between the homely, familiar form of the situations—autumnal leaf burning, loss of the bathhouse keys, a marital spat—and their ghastly content removes them from the range of our experience and leaves us free to laugh.

Addams has, furthermore, a deadly eye for the less attractive aspects of the middle-aged American male and female, and they themselves express emotions appropriate to the banal form of the situations but not to the gruesome content. The placid, ruminative expression of the portly householder raking the leaves to burn up his wife, and her own matronly figure and expression of malignant, impotent indignation—these make the scene funny instead of horrible.

There are ordinary people doing sinister things in an ordinary way. But Addams has a reverse formula, and it is the one for which he is best known: sinister people doing ordinary things in a sinister way. His Weird Family, his Bad Boy, and his flabby, fungous Moral Monster pursue their evil ends with wholehearted earnestness; they have their code of morality, which happens to be just the reverse of ours.

Living in domestic affection in their cobwebby Victorian haunted house, the gruesome Family happily watch the installation of a picture window with a superb view of a cemetery, put a sign on their gatepost: BEWARE OF THE THING, send over to the neighbors to borrow a cup of cyanide, and entertain the kiddies at bedtime with shadow pictures of a vampire bat…. Fair is foul and foul is fair as Addams's people hover through the fog and filthy air.

There is one other distinctive Addams formula: the juxtaposition of the remote, archaic past and the brisk, cellophaned present. Hansel and Gretel read a neat inscription on the witch's gingerbread cottage: CONTAINS GLUCOSE, DRY SKIMMED MILK, OIL OF PEPPERMINT…. One witch says to another as she empties a box labeled WITCH'S BREW into a kettle teeming with writhing horrors, "It's marvelous! All you do is add water!" The Colonial bellman makes his nightly round: "Ten o'clock and all's well. Yes, sir, and all's well, too with toothsome, savory, mild Royal George Snuff, made from the finest Old Dominion tobacco leaf."

Addams generally brings a sinister quality even to his use of the familiar cartoonist's device of taking a cliché and giving it a twist, a procedure known in the trade as The Switch. "Oh, I like missionary all right," one cannibal explains to another, "but missionary doesn't like me." (pp. 37-8)

The most popular single cartoon Addams ever produced is not a "horror" cartoon at all. It appeared early in 1940 and shows one skier looking with amazement at another who has just passed a tree leaving tracks that separate to go on each side of the tree.

There are at least two sizable groups of people who don't see anything funny in the ski cartoon. A psychiatrist at an Illinois home for the feeble-minded asked her charges whether they saw anything absurd about the picture. Those with a mental age of ten or more saw that the tracks could not in fact have been made by the skier, while those under that level saw nothing wrong. No inmate, of any age level, saw anything funny.

Neither did the logical Germans when Heute, a German-language magazine put out by the Americans in the first year of the occupation, reprinted the cartoon. Hundreds of readers wrote letters like: "I don't see how this is possible. Please print the answer to this puzzle." Others supplied answers: two one-legged skiers; the skier went down on one ski on one side of the tree, returned and went down on the other ski on the other side; the skier slipped a foot out of one ski's harness just before reaching the tree; etcetera. There was, it must be said, a reader in Nuremberg who advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of joke and went on to develop a general theory of humor.

Small wonder the Germans missed the point, since the ski cartoon, like much of Addams's work, is very much in the American grain, a lineal descendant of the tall tales of the frontier told by deadpan liars. Exaggeration seems to flourish in the American climate, and the impossible appeals to us as the essence of the comic.

In this sense, Addams's depiction of the prosaic in bizarre terms and of the bizarre in prosaic terms is in the line of the Paul Bunyan stories. Perhaps only an American humorist, with an American's knack for shifting gears between the real and the fantastic, could so consistently extract comedy from the macabre. (p. 40)