Peanuts: "A Deeply Personal Theater Of Cruelty" (And Bleakness, Sadism, Nihilism, Relentless And Profound Suffering, Anxiety, Humiliation, Passion, And Persistence)

Bruce Handy, The Atlantic, August 29, 2019

Charles Schulz did not create Charlie Brown and Linus and Lucy to talk—or act—like normal children. He created them to be funny, and to act out what became a deeply personal theater of cruelty. ... 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. I know I did. 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 ... Schulz met kids on their own terms, but then wrote up to them.

There is child-appropriate wisdom in Peanuts. The strip, begun in 1950 ... sometimes functions like a fable. ... They help to assuage unconscious fears about growing up and finding a place in the world—real anxieties exaggerated and made grotesque. ...

In Schulz, no one wins and everyone is thwarted, not only in love, but also on the baseball field or in the classroom ... [T]he quintessential Peanuts catchphrases are "Rats!", "Good grief!", "I can't believe it!", and "Augh!" ...

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. One of my favorite strips, from 1954 [JoS: it's actually 1958], depicts Charlie Brown sitting alone on a curb. In the first panel, a few raindrops are falling. 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? ...

What I took away from Schulz is that life is hard. People are difficult at best, unfathomable at worst. Justice is a foreign tongue. Happiness can vaporize in the thin gap between a third and fourth panel, and the best response to all that is to laugh and keep moving, always ready to duck. ...

Revisiting Schulz from a tender parental perspective can be eye-opening ... I now find myself dismayed at times by his sadism—and again, I don't think that's too harsh a word. As Schulz himself once admitted, or boasted, "Maybe I have the cruelest strip going." He knew the blackness of his heart where playing God was concerned.

Flipping through my old Peanuts paperbacks, I am appalled by a Valentine's Day sequence from 1964. Charlie Brown is sitting on a schoolyard bench and, as usual, eating his bag lunch alone. ... In the second panel, he leans forward, a look of embarrassed expectancy on his face ... Third panel. He's sitting back, his shoulders slumping and mouth drooping. ... Fourth panel. Charlie Brown turns away, his mouth now a quavering upside-down arc, his eyes wide, wobbly, and slightly askew. He looks as if he is trying desperately not to cry. ... [T]here's nothing the least bit droll or ironic, not even the tiniest movement of the needle toward wit. I find it almost exhilarating the way the strip transcends anything readers would normally expect from the funny pages.

Just as pitiless is the climax of an August 1963 baseball story, running over several days, in which Charlie Brown is pitching for his perennially lousy team in a championship game. ... Charlie Brown balks in the winning run. ... The wordless fourth panel shows Charlie Brown still on the mound, being pelted by hats and gloves. That's it. No attempt at a punch line, no sad little observation. Just humiliation, like a Fassbinder finale. ...

[I]f I were asked to pick the character most likely to find happiness if he or she ever grew up—the real kind, not just the glib, warm-puppy kind—I wouldn't hesitate to pick Charlie Brown. ... He feels his failures deeply, he suffers profoundly, and yet he remains ever willing to take another run at kicking the football or trying to get his kite aloft or pitching the next game or hoping this year, finally, to receive a valentine. If he is a blockhead, it is in part because he cares so much ... Like his creator, he has passion and persistence. If he were real, I like to tell myself, Charlie Brown would be fine.

This essay has been adapted from The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, forthcoming from Library of America.

This site has entire months of the strip on one page.

November 9, 1950 (the strip had been running less than six weeks)

February 24, 1954

July 7, 1954

February 14, 1956

March 28, 1960

October 13, 1960

October 18, 1960

December 22, 1962

January 28, 1963

August 19, 1963

April 1, 1964

October 21, 1965

March 23, 1966

August 8, 1966

September 9, 1966

November 5, 1966

In looking for some art for this post, I found this article from 2015: How Snoopy Killed Peanuts, by Kevin Wong (which I find I agree with, for the most part):

[A]s legendary as Peanuts is, it was only "great" for a 15-20 year period — from about the mid-50s to the early 70s. And even by the 70s, there was a slow, but definite drop-off in quality. ...

And unfortunately, much of the blame for this can be traced back to Snoopy, the most beloved of Schulz's creations. As the strip progressed, the beagle hogged more and more of the spotlight in increasingly negative ways. And the intelligence and darkness of the strip, which once made it so distinctive on the comics landscape, was replaced by more mainstream, cutesy humor.

The now famous debut strip ... establishes ... that this strip is not about the adorable inanities of being a child. It's about the cruelties and hardships of being a child; children can be bullying, backstabbing, petty people. And sometimes, children can be irrational, and hate someone for no reason — simply 'because.' ...

It was around the mid-late 50s that the strip really came into its own, and started cultivating an adult's despair and rejection. It allowed for Schulz to make pointed commentaries about the American dream, and the pressures of fulfilling it ...

And then there were other strips that were just pitch black [1957], with no happy resolution or redemption. Because sometimes, life isn't fair. ... It's difficult to think of a strip that so cruelly battered its main character in the way that Peanuts did. ...

Snoopy was always the wild card of the strip ... [H]e began the strip as a normal dog ... But a couple of years in, Schulz figured out how to characterize Snoopy; he was a dog who resented being a dog. ...

But the end result was always failure — for whatever reason, he would always revert to being a dog, because the new identity didn't fit him properly. It was a great commentary on self-acceptance, but also on embracing creativity and the need to dream of something better. ...

But near the end of the 60s and well into the 70s, the cracks started to show. Snoopy began walking on his hind legs and using his hands, and that was the beginning of the end for the strip. Perhaps he was technically still a dog, but in a very substantial way, Snoopy had overcome the principal struggle of his existence. His opposable thumbs and upward positioning meant that for all intents and purposes, he was now a human in a dog costume. ...

None of this had any greater, narrative payoff ... it lacked the subtlety, pain, and vision that had previously been the strip's trademark. ... Cuteness had replaced depth in a strip that had always celebrated the maturity and adult-like nature of precocious children. And since the strip had become globally, universally loved, there was little impetus to revisit the darker social commentary of years past.

Emily Todd VanDerWerff's piece for Vox, from December 2015:

The bulk of the comic strip's 50-year run is brilliant, bleak, and brutal. It's a deeply funny work about the utter depths of human despair, and about the ways we constantly seem to set ourselves and each other up to fail.

Peanuts, in other words, is one of the single greatest works of art of the 20th century. ...

[Y]ou can actually read the strip online, from the very first.

What you'll surely notice almost immediately is how damn bleak the strips are. ...

In Peanuts' early going, Charlie Brown is the only character with a definable personality, with goals, with a first and last name, even. And everybody else either seems to despise him or ignores him. He loses, constantly. He doesn't get anything he wants. He is defeated by his own failures ... but also by his friends ... and by the universe conspiring against him ...

More broadly speaking, though, nobody in Peanuts ever gets what they really want. They are defeated by delusions of grandeur ... or their own harsh natures ...

Schulz included at least a little bit of himself in every character he wrote, and for years, Peanuts hinted at the sorts of personal grievances and frustrations he felt toward other people in his life and in his personal and professional relationships.

For instance, as David Michaelis points out in his essential biography of the author, Schulz and Peanuts, when Schulz's first marriage was dissolving, he turned, again and again, to the theme of Lucy railing against Schroeder for caring more about his art than about her — which wasn't hard to read as Schulz's critique of his own wife. ...

[T]he longer you read Peanuts, especially its golden age from 1954 to 1974, the more obvious it becomes that the strip is an extremely personal work. It feels, at all times, as if you're looking directly into Schulz's soul to survey his values and cares. ... [I]t's utter despair that makes the strip so bracing.

That's why Peanuts' rise in the 1960s was so precipitous. Here was an empty, stark comic strip for an age in which mankind had the capacity to destroy itself — and yet it was laced with a gag (sometimes a very dark one, but a gag nonetheless) every day. It was the ultimate Midwestern expression: horror served with a smile.

And then Snoopy got turned into a stuffed animal, and everything changed. ...

I've always said 1974 marks the fall-off point for Peanuts because that year's output contains some of my favorite strips of the whole run, but already contains some of the flaws that would become more apparent in the years ahead. ...

But 1974 is also the year Schulz resolved a major conflict with his syndicator, which granted him complete control over the creative content and licensing of Peanuts. Up until that point, he could be overruled. From then on, he was completely in charge. The comic immediately lost some of its weightiness, now that he no longer faced a constant fight. ...

[M]erchandising took an already successful Schulz and made him incredibly rich. And while bleakness is certainly possible for the very rich, it seemed harder and harder for Schulz to reconnect with that part of the strip as he got older and richer. ...

Luke Epplin, Los Angeles Review of Books, writing in 2015 about Schulz and Bill Watterson:

On the surface, Peanuts seems an unlikely strip to spawn a global merchandising empire. Its cast of neurotic characters includes a depressed Everyman, a blanket-toting introvert, a domineering fussbudget, a single-minded pianist, and an anthropomorphic beagle that acts out fantasies atop his doghouse. Subverting the gag-cartooning formula, Peanuts strips often conclude not with a punch line but with an anguished expression of despair. "Why don't I go over and talk to that little red-haired girl?" Charlie Brown asks himself in a typical strip from 1964. "I can't…I just can't…I hate myself for not having enough nerve to talk to her! Well, that isn't exactly true…I hate myself for a lot of other reasons, too…" Insecure, apprehensive, and already seeking amateur psychiatric help at age eight, Charlie Brown became an improbable countercultural icon during a postwar era marked by public strength and private anxiety. ...

Schulz shied away from lofty pronouncements about his work. He claimed not to know what was meant by "existentialism" — a term frequently affixed to Peanuts — and he played down Lucy's psychiatric booth as a mere parody of a child's lemonade stand. His Midwestern sensibility carried with it an innate aversion to anything pretentious or elitist. "When people say to me, 'I really admire your philosophy,'" Schulz [said] in 1987, "I literally and honestly do not know what they are talking about because I don't even know what my philosophy is." What Schulz knew instinctively, however, is that success simply isn't funny. Instead, failure and self-doubt became the building blocks of his comedic style.

Earlier in the piece, Epplin writes that United Feature agreed to syndicate the strip in 1950, but forced Schulz to work in four tiny, equally sized boxes that he lamented were no bigger than "four air mail stamps". The name of the strip was also changed. Schulz proposed Good Ol' Charlie Brown, but United Feature decided on Peanuts. Schulz hated the name and he seethed about it for decades.

In an introduction to the 1975 compilation Peanuts Jubilee, he wrote: "Just as I have resented the size that I have been forced to work in, I have resented the title Peanuts that was forced upon me. I still am convinced that it is the worst title ever thought of for a comic strip."

And ... This Charming Charlie (Peanuts strips with song lyrics from The Smiths):