I felt bad for Charlie Brown, but I confess I didn’t feel that bad for him, no more than I did for less soulful, less worthy cartoon losers-Wile E. What do kids take away from all this bleakness? On some level, Charlie Brown’s relentless suffering comforted me, a lightning rod, I think, for my own anxieties about my place in the world- Peanuts as catharsis, as worst-case scenario, with the awaited thunderclap of laughter substituting for the reassurance of a fairy-tale happily-ever-after. The drawings’ wit is why I love this particular strip, Schulz’s deceptively casual line capturing the subtle shifts in Charlie Brown’s body language as he first sits up, noticing he’s being rained on then looks up, almost as if questioning the skies then slumps in submission both to the deluge and to his miserable place in a disinterested universe. “Winsomely depressing” might be the aspiration here. By the fourth panel, the rain is torrential, and Charlie Brown is still sitting in the same spot, mouthing the ostensible punch line to this otherwise purely visual cartoon: “It always rains on the unloved!” Is Schulz even trying to be funny? I don’t think so-not really. In the first panel, a few raindrops are falling. One of my favorite strips, from 1954, depicts Charlie Brown sitting alone on a curb. Justice is almost as beside the point in Schulz as realism rather, panel to panel, strip to strip, he just grinds his characters down, as if they were players in a children’s-theater adaptation of Camus or Sartre or Robert Johnson. Pigpen cleans up nicely, but it will be only a panel or two before he is once again filthy. Linus will never see the Great Pumpkin rise on Halloween. Lucy remains forever crabby, her pleasure in humiliating Charlie Brown eternally fleeting. Notwithstanding Happiness Is a Warm Puppy (charming, but a cash-in and, I’d argue, maybe wishfully, not canon), the quintessential Peanuts catchphrases are “Rats!,” “Good grief!,” “I can’t believe it!,” and “Augh!” Charlie Brown is, was, and always will be a blockhead. In Schulz, no one wins and everyone is thwarted, not only in love, but also on the baseball field or in the classroom or, where Snoopy is concerned, in the skies over World War I battlefields. In the latter, good generally wins out, however messily: Dragons get slain, witches are shoved into ovens, simpletons land fortunes, and so on. They help to assuage unconscious fears about growing up and finding a place in the world- real anxieties exaggerated and made grotesque.Ī Peanuts narrative, however, is the opposite of a fairy tale’s. I now think the strip’s hold on me as a child, besides that forbidden schadenfreude, must also have been somewhat analogous to the way traditional fairy tales enthrall children. Just as wolves always eat lambs if given the chance, so Lucy will always yank the football just as Charlie Brown attempts to kick it such is the nature of wolves and Lucys. Its characters, when viewed with a blurring squint, are as archetypal as the donkeys, lambs, wolves, and lions that populate Aesop. The strip, begun in 1950 and celebrated this October in a forthcoming essay collection from the Library of America, sometimes functions like a fable. There is child-appropriate wisdom in Peanuts. Schulz met kids on their own terms, but then wrote up to them. It helps, too, that the strip’s surface concerns are children’s: friendships, pets, baseball, kite flying, thumb sucking, schoolyard crushes. It helps that most of the jokes, references to Dostoyevsky and Beethoven notwithstanding, are accessible at a fairly early age, if not the deeper resonances of Schulz’s wit (such as the implication that adults also like to laugh at other people’s misery and pratfalls). I suspect that school-age children, who have to be shamed out of their natural inclination to laugh at others’ misfortune, enjoy Peanuts’ harshness as a subversive, vicarious thrill. But it is kids, real or unreal, that he put front and center, and it is kids who have been among his most avid readers, my own younger self very much included. He created them to be funny, and to act out what became a deeply personal theater of cruelty. And I am only scratching the surface of Peanuts’ absurd precocity.Ĭharles Schulz did not create Charlie Brown and Linus and Lucy to talk-or act-like normal children. Then there is the business of Schroeder playing Beethoven on his toy piano, and Lucy moonlighting as a psychiatrist, and Sally raging in one strip against “middle-class morality,” and pretty much all the characters’ impossibly articulate access to their every passing emotion. But kids, really? Most college-educated adults I know would be thrilled to attain Linus’s level of erudition he is, after all, conversant with the writings of Dostoyevsky, Orwell, and the apostle Paul. The Peanuts characters are among the most iconic kids in American culture, right up there with the March sisters and Tom Sawyer.
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