The Elm Student Newspaper
Part Four: Lecture Series
Volume 80, Issue 25
May 1, 2009
By Laura Walter
Elm Staff Writer
The torture habits of a well-known American family was the subject of the final American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series this week, as sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center and the Smithsonian.
Roz Chast, an illustrator for The New Yorker, discussed the cartoon by Charles Addams that featured the original Addams family at Christmastime. Chast began by recalling the many disturbing medical books in her house as a child. These tomes described a grand variety of maladies. She also overheard and was told a number of zany stories full of medical rarities (or inaccuracies).
These horrified her to no end, but eventually inspired her dark sense of humor. She likes to show the gamut of morbid and curious questions and ideas. Her own self-portrait is a comic of a young girl happily reading these those wild books of disease. It only makes sense that she would eventually turn to the dark side when reading comics, and thus she became smitten with the works of Charles Addams.
An earlier illustrator for The New Yorker, Addams had a simple, yet very dark idea of humor.
“I liked him because I knew what his work is about… and because I laughed at things I shouldn’t laugh at,” Chast readily admitted as she showed his cartoon of a young boy beheading a doll with a mini guillotine.
Of course, Addams is best known for creating the fantastically perverse cartoon from which the Addams Family is based.
The subject of this lecture was an image called “Boiling Oil,” which shows the family on a high balcony of their house as Christmas carolers serenade at the door. The Addams’ are tipping a large tureen of hot liquid over the side of the balcony as we watch, ready for the unsuspecting singers to turn into fish sticks.
The ironic treatment of the holiday is the fun part of this image. Addams effectively throws a pie in the face of the cheeriest holiday season by showing the imminent boiling of the carolers.
The print was originally designed for the Christmas edition of The New Yorker, but the editor would not allow the seemingly sadistic cartoon on the cover. The cartoon was nearly scrapped, but then it appeared inside, and made history.
It is interesting in the print how the family is just about to pour the vat of boiling oil, but they have not yet. Chast says, “The anticipation of it is delicious.”
This was the final lecture of the 2009 series, and we will wait with equally delicious anticipation for the program to begin again next spring.