Charlie Brown’s Wisest Line Remains a Peanuts Classic 29 Years Later

Peanuts was never as soft as its merchandise

It has been 26 years since Peanuts ended, and the strip often feels pre-digested. Even during its original run, much of it passed through T-shirts, greeting cards and inspirational wall posters. That reduced a lot of it to the benign emptiness of a Precious Moments figurine.

Read the strip on its own terms, though, and it has more of an edge than it gets credit for. That is especially true of the first half of its run. What put Peanuts on the map was the way Charles Schulz depicted childhood. Many other cartoonists of the time focused on the nostalgic joys of being a kid. Schulz wrote about its confusions and quiet terrors.

After decades in the American pop-cultural canon, people often forget this, but it is easily the strip’s most subversive element. Peanuts is frequently a meditation on how rough it really is to be a little kid. That made it a strong counterpoint to the more saccharine 1950s newspaper gag comics.

Charlie Brown himself is the best example of Schulz’s approach. He remains one of the most consistently unlucky characters in comics history. He has a terrible neighborhood baseball team and his own anxiety, and the world of Peanuts keeps piling further problems on him. He wins now and then. But if you binge the archive, the strip is largely a portrait of his depression.

That can be weirdly soothing. However bad your day, week or year is going, Charlie Brown was probably having a worse time. Many of his best quotations are either self-effacing punchlines or jokes about his own misfortune. His fictional history reads like an illustrated, G-rated version of the Book of Job.

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One strip sticks with me in particular. It is Peanuts for May 12, 1997. Charlie’s little sister Sally just wants help with her homework. Instead she gets an unusually sassy answer from her big brother, who is sunk into a bean bag chair and watching TV.

“We all need help with our homework. We’re all pleading for someone to listen. We’re all desperate.”

Charlie Brown says this without looking away from the TV. Within the strip, it is an unusually wordy way of telling Sally to go away. Against the background of Charlie Brown’s general mood, it reads as a view of him from the outside. He is busy wallowing in self-pity and has no time or room for Sally at the moment.

Out of context, the line works as a reminder to practice empathy. Every so often it gets tossed into the famous-quotes content mill, and it is easy to see why. It is tempting to get buried in your own head, but everyone is dealing with their own problems.

The strip probably won’t show up on any T-shirts, and it is unlikely to be printed on an inspirational poster. That is part of why I like it. It carries a useful moral, it is uncharacteristically snarky for Charlie Brown, and it isn’t a joke about his own failures. I’d call it a win for Charlie Brown and put it on the board.

Source: Polygon