Addams and His Ghouls

There is a large segment of the populace which for some reason is titillated by horror; the greater the horror, the greater its titillation. Charles Addams is its deity. It chuckles weekly at his pictures of trains bearing down on people strapped to the rails, of teddy bears lashed to the fenders of toy cars, of squat little men sharpening the spikes of their iron fences.

Simon and Schuster has now put a recent selection of these cartoons into an anthology, and this large single does of Addams points out one fact: he is not very funny. He has a stock family, a suitably ghoulish group of people, and he takes it through a series of situations which other cartoonists have long ago overworked.

This may be funny, on occasion. But it is a humor of simple incongruity, based only on the bizarre actions and appearances of its characters. The content of Addams' cartoons is monotonously repetitive; he simply switches the characters from one old situation to another. Addams shows little of the originality, the fresh viewpoint, so common to his companion New Yorker cartoonists. Unless you are bemused by the deformed and the deformer, "Monster Rally" may convince you that Addams does not belong in the same league.