At first blush, great American plays and great American comic strips would seem to have little in common. Why is it, then, that I think of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town whenever I think about Charles Schulz’s Peanuts?
I’m not arguing that the death of Emily Gibbs and the football gridiron ineptitude of Charlie Brown are on the same artistic plane. Perhaps the two works are linked in my mind because the plaintive, painful question posed by Emily in Wilder’s play — “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?” — describes my own complicated relationship with Schulz’s strip, which the cartoonist wrote and drew from 1950 until his death in 2000 at the age of 77.
Emily’s words convey understandable irritation at the way people permit seemingly simple but actually extraordinary things to escape their notice, and what could be more easily overlooked than a daily newspaper comic strip?
I was a devotee of comics, and the cartoonists who created them, from an early age. Even while I was still in short pants, though, I gravitated toward what I perceived to be the worldly sophistication of Jules Feiffer, Mike Luckovich, or Garry Trudeau: political satirists far removed from what I took to be the infantilism of the funny pages. Was I so wrong? A disproportionate number of strips, from Dennis the Menace and Garfield to Baby Blues and The Family Circus, were too slickly family-friendly for my taste and too reliant on bah-dum-dum jokes. Even the more sophisticated Calvin and Hobbes (a great strip, no doubt) was marred in my eyes by the prominence of its lead character’s absurdly overactive imagination. I was beyond Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood of Make-Believe, was I not?
To my eventual shame, my snobbishness extended to Peanuts, in which Schulz chronicled, over the course of six decades, the altogether-unremarkable exploits of a gaggle of youngsters led by the perennially down-on-himself Charlie Brown and his perpetually cool-headed beagle, Snoopy.
Like nearly every child born in the second half of the 20th century, I was certainly familiar with Peanuts. I was not immune to its charms, either. I even marked the turning of the seasons with a series of animated specials, including It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Yet, as my taste in toons matured, something in me resisted the strip’s persistent focus on “li’l folks” (to invoke the title of a strip that Schulz cooked up pre-Peanuts).
Then, in December 1999, came the terrible announcement that Schulz, sick with the cancer that would claim him swiftly, had decided to set aside his Peanuts duties. I remember well the avalanche of publicity generated by the news of the cartoonist’s out-of-the-blue retirement. Schulz sat for an interview with Al Roker on NBC’s The Today Show and was the subject of a gushing Newsweek cover story bearing the headline “Good Grief” and a sad-faced Charlie Brown — a sentiment a majority of people could surely share.
Overnight, I suddenly counted myself among their ranks.
What can I say? One often wants most that which one is deprived of, so I found myself feeling bereft when pondering the prospect of being unable to flip to a fresh installment of Peanuts each morning. What a bummer: Snoopy would no longer peck out mystery novels while seated on top of his dog house, and Lucy would no longer hold ersatz psychiatric sessions in her retrofitted lemonade stand. For his part, Schulz seemed almost painfully aware of how swiftly the end had come. “It didn’t really sink in until I was writing a little kind of a ‘so long, friends’ sort of thing, and then right at the end, I wrote my name,” Schulz told Roker. “All of a sudden, I thought, ‘You know, that poor kid — he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick.’”
During the interregnum between Schulz’s retirement announcement and his death on Feb. 12, 2000, I scrutinized with new appreciation collections of old Peanuts strips, soaking in, as though for the first time, the strip’s inimitable mix of companionable Midwestern humor and surprisingly cosmopolitan wit. It was a unique brew that resulted, perhaps, from Schulz having been born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but having lived most of his adult life in California. Schoolrooms, backyards, and baseball diamonds were among his usual settings, yes, but he was also apt to reference Andrew Wyeth and Wimbledon.
With fresh eyes, I looked at the striking aesthetics of Peanuts. I found myself touched by Schulz’s ragged yet painstaking lettering, the letters written vertically, not with the hasty, sloping incline of Trudeau, and haltingly sketched characters. Well, these handmade qualities were the very opposite of the slickly drawn family-oriented strips whose charm eluded me.
There was something more, too. Like Francois Truffaut’s Small Change (1976) or Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Peanuts dared to treat youthful woe with as much respect as grown-up sorrow. The stakes may be relatively low when Charlie Brown fails yet again in announcing his love for the Little Red-Haired Girl, but that does not make his predicament any less affecting or relatable. In largely exiling grown-up characters from the world of the strip, Schulz magnified the concerns of Charlie Brown and company. We never laugh at the young characters’ plights, as we do in Ernie Bushmiller’s brilliant but sarcastic strip Nancy, but derive humor from empathizing with Charlie Brown’s humility, Lucy’s forthrightness, and Linus’s earnestness. These qualities are not signs of immaturity but aspects of personality. Sure, Peanuts could be cute, but even the sight of Snoopy carrying his dog bowl in his mouth reflects an insight: Dogs may be a boy’s best friend, but a desire to be fed is usually foremost in the mind of a canine.
Then, just as I had started to appreciate Peanuts anew, the bottom fell out. Not more than 24 hours before newspaper presses coast to coast printed Schulz’s concluding strip, the cartoonist passed away; he died on Feb. 12, and the strip on Feb. 13. My father told me it reminded him of Stanley Kubrick dying upon the completion of his final film, Eyes Wide Shut — a major event in my movie-obsessed youth. Of course, I had long been an admirer of Kubrick while I had only just started to take the full measure of Schulz.
In the 20 years that have passed since Peanuts and Schulz both left the Earth, I have never gone back on my respect for the strip. For years, I read reruns each day in the paper. There’s something to be said for its timelessness next to the dated quality of old Doonesburys, and I have spent good money on my share of hardcover editions from Fantagraphics Books, gathering each and every installment of the strip.
I curse myself only for being late to the party way back in 1999. Perhaps my devotion to Peanuts during these last two decades is a form of penance for misapprehending Schulz when he was still alive. Then again, maybe not. After all, a penance is supposed to be a painful thing, but spending time with this great comic strip offers undiluted pleasure.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
