Why The Addams Family Characters Went Nameless For Three Decades
Charles Addams' very first Addams Family comic strip — or at least a proto-version of the Family — appeared in the pages of the New Yorker in 1938. In the strip, a vampire-like woman stands next to a large, bearded, brutish man at the foot of a staircase in a haunted mansion. Bats fly overhead and spider webs adorn the light fixtures. A creepy third member of the family peers down through a railing high above. Standing at the door is an eager, white-suited vacuum cleaner salesman attempting to hawk his wares. "Vibrationless, noiseless, and a great time and back saver. No well-appointed home should be without it," the salesman says. He is unperturbed to be in a haunted house, and presses on with his sales pitch, even though the manse has clearly never been swept.
Charles Addams would revisit these creepy characters regularly, eventually settling on a core cast of characters. The vampire woman would come to be the matriarch of the family, and her husband would be a squat, troll-like fellow. They would have two antisocial brat children and an outsized butler. The characters were never named in Addams' strips — one-panel comics aren't really conducive to telling long-form stories — so readers merely began to refer to them as "the Addams family." The Addams Family appeared in 57 additional New Yorker strips over the years.
It wouldn't be for decades, however, that the characters would be given proper names. When production began on the celebrated 1964 TV series based on Addams' work, that decision had to be made. What were these people called?
Given the ghoulish family's extant nickname, it followed logically they should remain the Addams Family, but Charles Addams also had to come up with first names for all these characters for the first time.
They really are a scree-um
According to an article in Mental Floss, Charles Addams had a few suggestions for the Addams Family's first names that the studio shot down. Morticia was settled on right away, but Addams wanted to name the family Patriarch "Repelli Addams," that is: it sounds like "repellant." The studio went with "Gomez" instead, which has no pun. Addams also wanted to name the Addams son "Pubert," which ABC rejected because it sounded a little dirty, that is: like "puberty." The studio went with "Pugsley." Not incidentally, the new Addams baby born in the 1993 film "Addams Family Values" was named Pubert.
The story of Wednesday Addams' name is a little more involved, and the A.V. Club, back in 2018, unearthed the story. A woman named Joan Blake, the story goes, met Charles Addams when she was depressed at a college party sometime in 1964. Blake and Addams had a lovely conversation wherein he revealed that "The Addams Family" was becoming a sitcom, but that he hadn't yet invented a name for the daughter. Blake suggested "Wednesday" after a famous folk poem: "Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace. Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go," etc. The poem, incidentally, was passed along orally for generations, but it wasn't first printed until 1838 in the magazine Traditions of Devonshire.
There are no interesting stories, sadly, behind the names of Granny Frump, Uncle Fester, or Lurch the Butler. According to the Metal Floss article, however, actor John Astin initially auditioned to play Lurch, but was given the role of Gomez instead. Ted Cassidy played Lurch, and it was Cassidy's improv that led to his common line of dialogue "You raaang?"
Cousin Itt
As for Cousin Itt, he was invented for the TV show. Cousin Itt was a being seemingly made entirely of hair, and who spoke in chittering jibberish. Cousin Itt has appeared in every iteration of "The Addams Family" since 1964. Itt was a suggestion of David Levy, one of the show's producers, based on an idle Charles Addams sketch. It seems that Addams drew a hairy creature on the telephone, saying "This is It speaking." Levy liked the sketch so much that Cousin Itt became a part of the show. Felix Silla played the part underneath all the hair. In the more recent animated "Addams Family" movies, Snoop Dogg played Cousin Itt.
Another fun piece of trivia (also culled from Mental Floss): it seems that the New Yorker didn't want to be associated with the TV series, and forbade the publication of Addams Family strips during the show's run. Charles Addams was still employed as a regular cartoonist at the publication, and the editors — feeling that TV was a "low" and classless medium — didn't want their star artist tainting their pages. Addams would continue to contribute to the New Yorker until his death in 1988.
The Addams Family lives on in popular media, and the names selected by ABC execs back in the 1960s have stuck. The most recent version of "The Addams Family" came in the form of Tim Burton's Netflix series "Wednesday," about the young Addams daughter struggling through boarding school. Jenna Ortega plays Wednesday. As of this writing, a second season is in the works.