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Odd things you learn from Charles Addams

Going through My Crowd, a delightful collection of Charles Addams’ cartoons, I stumble across one where Morticia and Granny Addams are sitting for tea on the porch, and Morticia is knitting something as she says … and if it’s a boy, we’re going to give him a biblical name, like Cain or Ananias..

Now, we all know who Cain was, but who was Ananias? The name is a latinized form of the jewish “Hananiah”, and the reference is to a particular figure in the New Testament, who lied to his fellows in an early Christian group and was struck dead as he talked. Apparently, the name is used in English to mean a habitual liar. It’s a term that would be familiar to Addams’ audience, whom I assume would belong mostly to the same American middle-class milieu that is the target of most of his humor.

Realizing this, I suddenly wish that each cartoon had a date attached, telling me when it was first drawn and printed. Because this book is a historical document. It images of computers – huge, room-filling boxes, of chinese labourers smoking Opium, of people playing golf and attending the Opera and gardening in the suburbs, of anthropologists interacting with head-shrinkers and natives armed with blowpipes… when was this taking place, exactly? Knowing that the New Yorker started publishing Addams’ cartoons in in 1935 and that he continued creating work for five decades (as the back cover explains) really doesn’t help pinpoint a reference…