by H. Allen Smith and illustrated by Charles Addams
First Edition | Double Day & Company, Inc. | 1953
This post is only incidentally about the book The Compleat Practical Joker or its author, H. Allen Smith. Rather it’s about Charles Addams (1912-1988), who illustrated the dustjacket.
Addams, as you may well know, was a cartoonist most famous for his Addams Family series about a spooky gothic family. But what isn’t as well known is that the members of the Addams Family–Gomez, Morticia, Pugsley, Wednesday, Grandmama, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Thing, and Cousin Itt–all existed as separate characters long before The Addams Family television show aired in 1964.
In fact, the first published Addams Family cartoon was in The New Yorker in 1938. It’s a one-panel gag that features a then-unnamed Morticia and a proto-Lurch–who looks more like Boris Karloff than Frankenstein’s monster. Morticia is the earliest of the Addams Family characters to be introduced, later followed by Gomez, the children, and Fester. In 1946, we see these core members gathered together, possibly for the first time, celebrating the holidays by scalding Christmas carolers with boiling oil.
Which is why it’s not very unusual to see Uncle Fester peeking around the corner of The Compleat Practical Joker’s (1958) dustjacket, even though it is almost a decade before the airing of the television show. Addams often reused his favorite characters and Fester, being the most like Charles Addams himself, is the perfect character to illustrate a book on practical jokes. After all, Addams was a satirist, cartoonist, and humorist. Fester lights up the topsy-turvy room.
The Addams Family television show only lasted two seasons, but Charles’ unique gothic sensibility has stood the test of time–with the 90s movies, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, the modern Netflix series, and even a musical–helping to ensure that Charles Addams’ art and legacy haunts us to this day.
They’re creepy and they’re kooky
Mysterious and spooky
They’re all together ooky
The Addams family
“The Addams Family Theme”
by Andrew Gold