Farewell to ‘Peanuts’Jan. 4, 2000
.Today is the first day, after nearly half a century, that the daily comic strip ”Peanuts” will not appear. Just why it would be funny to see a young boy lean his head against a tree and say ”I weep for our generation” is hard to explain, but Charlie Brown and his creator, Charles M. Schulz, made it so. Mr. Schulz, who is 77 and ill with colon cancer, and the generation that grew up reading ”Peanuts” may feel like crying too.
Over the years, ”Peanuts” has been many things to many people — an animated embodiment of the Christmas spirit, a stockpile of reassuring sentiments, a collection of fantasies lived through a beagle named Snoopy. But for a time between the late 1950’s and the mid 1960’s ”Peanuts” was also something much, much more. It was, in the persons of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy Van Pelt, and her brother, Linus, a distillation of modern childhood, an ongoing parable of contemporary American existence.
The block where those characters lived — and still live — was the scene of a comic opera whose themes are acceptance, reason, and authority. Linus is the voice of reason — the blanket-toting boy who hesitates between ”The Interpreter’s Bible” and ”Moby Dick” while looking for something to read with his bowl of cereal. But reason is nearly always trumped by authority, whose name is Lucy — proprietor of a sidewalk psychiatric office and purveyor of gloriously certain and erroneous knowledge. And then there is Charlie Brown, buffeted by desire and despair, transparently aware of his own emotions, painfully eager for heroism or even simple acceptance. He is burdened as much by Lucy’s erratic dogmatism as he is by Linus’s outrageous competence. It is Charlie Brown, after all, who brings a little red fire truck to ”show and tell” on the same day that Linus brings a homemade facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
What made ”Peanuts” different in those years was its joyous melancholy, the way it so often edged toward irony without ever spilling into anomie. Its humor arose from its situations — Snoopy, a jump-rope wrapped around his nose, pleading, ”Don’t put a brand on me, sir . . . I’ll stay in the corral!” — but also from its prose. Those classic strips are among the most eloquent comics ever written. For every ”Rats!” or ”Good Grief!” there is Snoopy noticing that ”In these teacher-pupil struggles it’s always the principal who loses,” or Linus shaking out his security blanket and saying, ”Not unlike the proverbial clean slate,” or Charlie Brown lying with his head on the pitcher’s mound, intoning autumnally, ”There’s a dreariness in the air that depresses me.” Today, that is how we all feel knowing that ”Peanuts” has run its course.
