The Addams Family is a fictional household created by American cartoonist Charles Addams in 1938. The Addams Family originally included Gomez and Morticia Addams, their children Wednesday and Pugsley, close family members Uncle Fester and Grandmama, their butler Lurch, and Pugsley’s pet octopus Aristotle. The dimly seen Thing (later a disembodied hand) was introduced in 1954, and Gomez’s Cousin Itt and Morticia’s pet lion Kitty Kat in 1964.

The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening. They originally appeared as an unrelated group of 150 single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker between their debut in 1938 and Charles Addams’ death in 1988. They have since been adapted to other media. In 1964, a live-action television series, starring John Astin and Carolyn Jones, premiered on ABC and subsequently inspired a 1977 television film and cameos from the cast in other shows. An unrelated animated series aired in 1973.

For TV Guide, which listed the characters in the top ten of The 60 Greatest TV Families of All Time, the Addamses “provided the design for cartoonish clans to come, like the Flintstones and the Simpsons”. Ricci’s portrayal of Wednesday in the film series was ranked one of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters by Empire, and in 2011 AOL named Morticia one of The 100 Most Memorable Female TV Characters.

Addams’ original cartoons were one-panel gags. The characters were undeveloped and unnamed until the television series production.

Gomez and Pugsley are enthusiastic. Morticia is even in disposition, muted, witty, sometimes deadly. Grandma Frump is foolishly good-natured. Wednesday is her mother’s daughter. A closely knit family, the real head being Morticia—although each of the others is a definite character—except for Grandma, who is easily led. Many of the troubles they have as a family are due to Grandma’s fumbling, weak character. The house is a wreck, of course, but this is a house-proud family just the same and every trap door is in good repair. Money is no problem.
— Charles Addams

The family appears to be a single surviving branch of the Addams clan. Many other “Addams families” exist all over the world. According to the film version, the family credo is, Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc (pseudo-Latin: “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us”). Charles Addams was first inspired by his hometown of Westfield, New Jersey, an area full of ornate Victorian mansions and archaic graveyards. In the original comics series they live in a gothic house on Cemetery Ridge. According to the television series, they live in a gloomy mansion adjacent to a cemetery and a swamp. In The Addams Family musical (first shown in Chicago in 2009), the house is located in Central Park. In The Addams Family (2019 film), they live in an abandoned, haunted asylum.

Although most of the humor derives from the fact that they share macabre interests, the Addamses are not evil. They are a close-knit extended family. Morticia is an exemplary mother, and she and Gomez remain passionate towards each other; as established in the television series, she calls him “bubbeleh”, to which he responds by kissing her arms, behavior which Morticia can also provoke by speaking a few words in French (their meanings are not important; any words in French will do). The parents are supportive of their children. The family is friendly and hospitable to visitors, in some cases it is willing to donate large sums of money to causes (television series and films), despite the visitors’ horror at the Addamses’ peculiar lifestyle.

Charles Addams began as a cartoonist in The New Yorker with a sketch of a window washer that ran on February 6, 1932. His cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1938, when he drew the first instance of what came to be called The Addams Family, until his death in 1988.

In 1946, Addams met science fiction writer Ray Bradbury after drawing an illustration for Bradbury’s short story “Homecoming” in Mademoiselle magazine, the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois monsters, the Elliotts. Bradbury and Addams became friends and planned to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family’s complete history, with Bradbury writing and Addams providing the illustrations; but it never materialized. Bradbury’s Elliott Family stories were anthologized in From the Dust Returned (2001), with a connecting narrative, an explanation of his work with Addams, and Addams’s 1946 Mademoiselle illustration used for the book’s cover jacket. Although Addams’s own characters were well established by the time of their initial encounter, in a 2001 interview, Bradbury states that Addams “went his way and created the Addams Family and I went my own way and created my family in this book.”