The Uncle Fester principle

A 1946 Charles Addams cartoon, “Sad Movie” (see Fig. 1), shows a movie theater full of people watching a film. We don't see the screen, but the faces of the audience members – eyes wide, brows furrowed, tears running down cheeks – tell us that they are watching something distressing, maybe tragic. In the second row of the weeping crowd, slightly off-center, sits a familiar Addams ghoul, the character later named Uncle Fester, his face lit up in a grin. As in so many Addams cartoons, no caption is provided. His smile is the only punchline the joke needs.

By making a spectacle of the audience, showing not the action onscreen but the reaction in the seats, the cartoon diverts attention from the upsetting events of the film to the comic impropriety of Uncle Fester's laughter. Addams's joke hinges on the discord between Fester's cruel pleasure and the heartfelt tears of the crowd. But although it is the deviant reaction that makes the scene a joke, it would be too simple to call Fester the object or the target of our laughter. For we are complicit with him; we feel that he shares our emotional distance from the movie, and hence our aesthetic superiority to those moved to tears by the spectacle on the screen. “The mind is complex and ill-connected, like an audience,” William Empson wrote; this audience is complex and ill-connected like a mind. Indeed, I suggest, Addams's audience gives us a picture of the modernist mind. Some minds are full of Uncle Festers in the seats of their intrapsychic cinemas, others have only one, but without any we are not fully modern. Call this the Uncle Fester Principle.