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So as I mentioned before, I've been watching the old Addam's Family show lately. The library had them and they are inextricably tied to childhood Halloweens for me. My dad and I loved that show and would watch it together, much as we watched Doctor Who and Creature Double Feature every Saturday. My father and I were very close right up until the AIDS crisis and my taste in men as a teen combined to make wild family drama in my teens. We'd settle in to watch the show and my dada had invented his own alternative punchlines to some of the jokes.

Watching it all these years later, the show still holds up just fine. Yes, the plots tend to follow a pattern and there is no character development, but this was the 60's and compare it to the other sitcoms of its time and it's stand out head and shoulders above them all. The jokes are still funny though, likely because one of their writers was one of Groucho's writers and a life long friend of the most wry Marx Brother. They managed to make things funny for adults and children without descending to the formulaic cruelty of many sitcoms.

If you think about it, Addams Family is about acceptance. It's a forerunner to goth culture in more ways than just the aesthetic. Lurch may not be a particularly good butler, but when he has a problem everyone pitches in to help. Same with anyone in the Addams Family. No one in the family is the butt of the joke. It's not all about how dumb the father is, or how ditsy the mother is, like most sitcoms of the 50s and 60's. There is no deliberate cruelty or domestic violence played for laughs. (I'm looking at you, Honeymooners.) Ultimately, Addams family is about eccentric people forming a family and loving each other as themselves. They are not some weird, sanitized unattainable ideal of the American dream, instead whether gathered through blood or not, they are chosen family, outsiders forming their own subculture. No wonder I loved it. No wonder I wanted to be Gomez when I grew up.

I think it worked for Burns and Allen because he absolutely adored her.

I think it worked for the Addams family because they really did care about each other RL. Jones and Aston were never a couple, but they genuinely enjoyed each other's company as human beings and it shows in the scenes. Aston loved kids and he and Carolyn Jones treated the children as if they were family off stage as well as on. cousin Itt, who was Pugsly's double would play with them back stage. Jackie Koogan (fester) was very protective of them having been the original iconic Hollywood Child star, the one they named the first legislation to protect child actors for because of how thoroughly he was screwed over. Apparently ted cassidy was a sweetheart RL, with kids of his own and much missed when he died so young. Wednesday and Pigsly's actors fought off stage, but in a brother/sister sort of way, rather than mean, if that makes sense.

I never could stand "I Love Lucy" though I have respect for the actress as both a business woman and a screen actress. I'm not big on slapstick and the "crazy red head" routine and the weirdness with the husband made me unhappy watching it. I've never been able to sit through a whole "honeymooners" episode no matter how brilliant people claim it is.