Like everyone else I watched the Great Pumpkin and Christmas specials every holiday season growing up. It’s only later and as an adult with a child that I began really watching cartoons again with an adult perspective. There’s been a Peanuts marathon going on lately and as I’ve watched it with my 2 year old one thing stands out.
No one in the Peanuts universe is happy.
Sure Charlie Brown is an introspective morose ball of insecurity, but no one else is ever happy either. Sometimes satisfied, sometimes briefly amused, sometimes pontificating.
I dunno about that…some of the children are just actively malevolent, and some are often overwhelmed by brief, blinding joy in the thought of pursuing ideal happiness, doomed to be unattainable as it is.
Schulz was an unhappy guy, and it’s reflected in his work.
There are some warmer moments in the strip. Look how Charlie Brown brightens when he visits his dad’s barber shop, for instance. C.B. lives in an uncertain world that’s out to get him, but one thing he knows he can rely on is that his dad loves him.
Yeah, Peanuts childhood isn’t great, but that moment when late teen, early-20s Chuck is having a few beers with Patty & Marcie, and they finally get him in that three-way they’ve been planning for years, Chuck will realize that after all, it is a wonderful life.
Peanuts became popular in part because before that most common portrayals of children and children’s lives depicted kids as carefree and happy and with no heavy worrisome problems to haunt them. And cute and sweet also. Schulz wrote Peanuts in such a way that an entire generation of people read it and identified with those kids: “Oh, yeah, that’s how I felt when I was a kid!”.
Understanding that kids DO have heavy weighty stuff on their minds and agonize about things and consider themselves miserable a good portion of the time. And have to deal with other kids. Kids don’t treat each other nicely and sweetly all the time.
Schulz struggled with anxiety and depression his whole life. He also was trying to be funny, and thought that happiness and victories were not funny, so that part of life is seldom depicted.
The secret to the success of Peanuts is that it appeals to the part of everyone who thinks like Charlie Brown, that they are the only person with sad and anxious thoughts. There is great comfort in the idea that we are not alone in our anxiety.
I certainly loved it as a kid. Most other comics were just treacley or stupid (often both). Peanuts had a genuine intelligence to it, but without going over kid’s heads (at least not mine). When they began work on the very first Peanuts animated special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, they chose to do something that was groundbreaking for the time: They cast actual children as the voice actors. Before that adults just imitated kid’s voices for cartoons, consequently they were always exaggerated & unrealistic (same as most comic strips were).
Way back I remember a comedian making a joke that he thought that the Peanuts cartoons might have taken place at Love Canal, because all the children had huge, bulbous heads, short, tiny legs, and every adult talked like a muted trumpet!
I loved the strip as a kid. I agree that Schulz didn’t actively avoid sadness, confusion, etc., the way other strips of the day might have. But I always thought the kids were genuinely happy.
Linus, particularly. He seemed to draw a lot of comfort and joy (see what I did there?) from his faith. I remember a particular strip where Charlie Brown and Linus are sitting there at the brick fence, talking. First panel: The subject of money comes up (don’t remember specifically how). Second panel: Linus quotes the King James Bible: “The labourer is worthy of his hire. Luke 10:7” Third panel: Charlie Brown looks stunned, while Linus sits there with that smug, you-know-I’m-right grin on his face.
Peanuts didn’t shy away from depicting painful moments, but that didn’t mean it was unremittingly dark. There were plenty of small, sweet moments that added up to quite a lot. You can read about many of them here and here.
There were also the “happiness is” strips. Some of them had the “happiness is” saying in the final panel, while some of them had them as a “stamp” in a larger panel. (Those were the inspiration for the song from You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.)
So you could make a case that Peanuts was saying that sure, there was trouble in life, even for kids…but there’s still a lot of joy to be found in the smaller, quieter moments of life.
The book: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography is a great read that gives all kinds of insight into what went into writing the comic.
One interesting thing I learned from it, that applies to this thread, is that the term “depressed” didn’t gain popularity until after it was used to describe Charlie Brown in Peanuts.
Bill Watterson explains, in a book review of the Schulz biography Bob Ducca mentioned (which I have not read, but which I assume explains in much greater detail). Or, what puddleglum said.
As a kid I could identify with the kids in Peanuts. That tinge of reality made it a appealing. The surge of Snoopy surrealism made it great. Most other comic strips of the time had no soul.
I think they were as happy as any other kids growing up in another era. Life was often mundane, school was a drag, some kids are bullies. Are kids today happy? or happier? I love Peanuts FOR the darkish side of life. A thousand other comic strips portray kids as stick figures spouting snappy one-liners, they’re dull, they don’t last, and I don’t find snappy one-liners funny. Calvin and Hobbes had a LOT of sadness in it. I read through a whole collection in one sitting and I kind of laughed, kind of cried. But Bill Watterson was a genius. Just like Charles Schultz.