A Pilgrim’s Digression

Last weekend, while entertaining Brendan in Wal-Mart while Lynn did the shopping, I was browsing the DVD aisle and happened to see that The Addams Family is now available on DVD.

“Hmmm,” methinks to meself, “I loved that show when I was a kid. How much is it? Ah, only $19.99 for season one.”

So I picked it up.

I’ve written before about how much TV I watched when I was a kid. Television was on all the time, usually tuned to the TBS Superstation after school, from around three to seven. TBS broadcast all the great TV shows from the sixties and seventies that had been released to syndication. But The Addams Family was a rare treat.

It seemed like it was not in the usual rotation of shows. Every season, TBS would switch things up by showing Green Acres instead of The Beverly Hillbillies, for example. But The Addams Family was not shown often. The Munsters were the prevalent monster sitcom for most of my childhood.

However, what little I had seen of The Addams Family made me a devotee. It was much better than The Munsters, I thought. And that theme song! It was like Gilligan’s Island: once you hear it, you will never forget that song as long as you live. You will be on your death bed and you will still be able to sing:

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky / Mysterious and ooky…”

Sad to say, I won’t remember any of the poetry I memorized in my briefly intellectual youth, but I will remember the theme songs to my favorite TV shows.

So, having brought Season One of the Addams Family home, we have begun watching an episode or two on a nightly basis. Brendan has been captivated. He makes us play the opening over and over so he can hear the song (it has prompted him to work on his snap), and he already knows all the characters and their eccentricities.

The show is a hit with us all.

Last night, as we watched a couple episodes, I started putting together a few thoughts on the show that, as a child, I would have completely missed. It’s funny the things you notice watching these great shows again, as an adult.

Gomez is a nymphomaniac. Lynn actually pointed this out. His passion for his wife seems unabated by time or children. And in a way, it’s rather refreshing to see, in a sitcom. Today, the usual gag, e.g. Everybody Loves Raymond, is for the husband to want sex, but the wife to be tired or unwilling. Gomez and his mi querido, Morticia, go at it like young lovers.

There are even a few adult-themed jokes in the dialogue, not just between them but in the show generally. How this one got past the censors, I don’t know, but there is an episode where the family mistakes an Avon saleslady for a suitor for Uncle Fester. The language of capitalist exchange is at the center of the jokes here, and as the family comes to realize that the Avon lady is really out for money (Uncle Fester’s, they think), the Avon lady delivers one of the best punch-lines ever: “How ever do you do it?” Morticia asks, dumbfounded at the woman’s apparent brazenness.

“Why, I just give out a free sample, and the product sells itself.”

Another thing I find interesting is how the show uses difference–the weird, creepy, and kooky–to suggest that maybe conventional life is what is really messed up.

Gomez does not work. Instead he stays home all day in his smoking jacket, dancing with his wife, playing with his kids, and generally enjoying life. He and his wife play games together. Besides the usual (ahem) man/woman games, the two of them play checkers (Morticia always wins) and target practice with crossbows. Pugsley and his father play with electric trains together, taking turns deciding who is going to blow up the bridge or force the trains into a head-on collision; and Gomez and his daughter, Wednesday, collect spiders together for her collection.

If this seems idyllic rather than weird to you, then you aren’t alone. I had the same thought.

If the Addams are the non-traditional family, then I’d like me some of that.

Indeed, the butt of the jokes are always the people of conventional manners and habits. Properly suited and be-hatted men come ring the doorbell–local government officials, postmen, lawyers, doctors–and go away offended or frightened by the unconventionality of the Addams family.

Sometimes these men try to take advantage of the Addams family, usually to their detriment. Not that Gomez has to do anything to stop them: this is a comedy, and the crooks are foiled by their own stupidity or evil. The Addams’ are completely innocent, however, in all sense of the word.

Generous to a fault, Gomez reads in the paper that the city zoo is in trouble, so he calls the parks director over to the house so he can make a donation. The man is shocked by the Addams family, but not so shocked that he won’t accept a check. Later, when Morticia suggests that Cousin It might like a job at the zoo, Gomez calls the park director up and jokingly tells hm he has another donation to make. The man eagerly returns to the house, and though he is at first horrified by Cousin It, he decides that the furry guy would make a great star attraction in the zoo.

He has some attendants from the zoo kidnap It and take him away in chains. All the while, the Addams’ believe that Cousin It is hard at work at his new job. When Fester goes to the zoo to visit, he reports back that It has an enormous, outdoor office with iron grillwork all around it, and a large meal of bananas for lunch. Only when the park director comes looking for his prize exhibit does the truth come out, and even then Gomez and family remain ignorant of the true maliciousness of the director.

Cousin It is by far one of the most fascinating characters on the show–second only to Thing in Brendan’s curiosity. One could make a lot of theoretical hay from this hairy little nob of a fellow, whose name might be mispronounced as Cousin Id. To visitors to the Addams house, he is always the most horrific creature, despite his child-like, high-pitched voice and (I would say) cuteness. The only thing more horrific to conventional taste is…Thing. The disembodied hand, the Thing, like the hairy It, is a representation of inner desire. The hand touches. The Thing is the medium through which we attain our desires, as much as the It is the expression of those desires in all their generally unacceptable “hairiness.”

What I find most interesting about this show, and for that matter The Munsters as well, is how these shows sprang up at a time when complete conformity to societal rules and expectations were the rule. Sublimation of all desire was the rule. Equal love and passion, such as represented by Tish and Gomez, were nowhere represented on TV (with the sole exception, perhaps, of The Dick van Dyke show), where the man was an autocrat and the wife’s goofiness was comic relief. On TV, Lucy and Desi slept in separate beds, a fact which still astonishes. The Beatles and Stones had just entered the picture (Gomez at one point wonders if Cousin It might not make a good fifth member of the Beatles). Hippies were unknown, though Beatniks were still around.

And yet here comes this show where the husband and wife not only sleep in the same bed, but apparently have sex and (gasp) love it. Here comes a show where the men in gray flannel suits are the ones who are the real horrors, binding poor Cousin It in chains, and generally disapproving of everything about the Addams family and their eccentric way of life.

I do not think I have ever seen this show before now. Not really. It is truly a classic, and a great rediscovery.