Today's society seems to think that they were.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvand...
In our day that question as far as I know never arose.
I used to and still do love to watch Tom and Jerry and similar cartoons and yes I laugh out loud just as I once did waaaaay back then.
Maybe the real question here is would you let your children/grandchildren watch them ?
If you wouldn't consider hammering someone's head and running after a sneaky mouse all over, trying to hurt each other violent, then maybe my childhood's Tom and Jerry is not violent. ;) And no, I would definitely not let my child watch this in the future. I had to scan their cartoons first.
not really....as least not compared to today....we never had vampires and zombies as our idols growing up