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Tribute To Charles Schulz January, 2000

One of the great things about writing is how much one part of you educates another, more conscious, part while you're doing it. By the time I had finished my tribute to "Sparky" (written less than a month before he died), I was in awe of the man. I still am.

Fanboy Rampage By Jeff Lester

It bummed me out. Not just Charles Schulz retiring Peanuts and leaving the comics field, but all the hype, all the adulation, all the letters from fans begging the man not to go, that were printed in newspaper after newspaper. All these earnest praises, with stock phrases like "Peanuts never failed to bring a smile to my morning," or some such crap (let's be honest; there was a two year period where I felt like Schulz had converted to Zen Buddhism and was using Peanuts to retell some of his favorite obscure Zen koans), made me think that nobody got it. We were all too close to see what Schulz and Peanuts had done. There is arguably no piece of the American Zeitgeist that was more dadaist, more bleak and more intimately allegorical than Schulz's Peanuts.

Like some sort of ink-splashing Jed Clampett, Schulz tapped directly and, as far as I can tell, accidentally, into that Zeitgeist. Peanuts (or Li'l Folks, or whatever it was first called) debuted in just seven U.S. papers in 1950, and so his strip started right at the early days of the Baby Boom. Schulz's strip of all-important children was there for record numbers of children who would grow up to see themselves as all-important. I can't help but feel that no matter the quality of the strip, Peanuts would have been at least an insubstantial hit; the Rugrats or the Home Alone of its day.

But Schulz also tapped into something far darker and more direct, pretty much from that first strip. In it, we see two kids sitting on a step, as a prototypical Charlie Brown skips by, obliviously happy. The one kid talks through all four panels while the other listens attentively: "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown! Good ol' Charlie Brown...yes, sir! Good ol' Charlie Brown...how I hate him!"

Despite all that goo that Newsweek shovelled around about Schulz being a purveyor of quiet and fundamentally decent values, a good chunk of Peanuts is about rejection, and loathing, and the resultant depression and self-hatred that results. Roughly ten years after that debut, here's the opening of a typical strip: "You're a fool, Charlie Brown! I don't know why I waste my time even talking to you!" Unlike your typical schlemiel joke, most of the time there is no reason ever shown for everyone's hatred of Charlie Brown. Walking around throughout the strip, frequently holding his stomach and saying, "I can't stand it," Charlie Brown presents an image of the outsider that we see moving in comic art from Crumb through Clowes. In being true to his childhood (and resulting adulthood), Schulz allowed several generations to be in touch with their outsider status and feelings of inadequacy. Every time I've ever hated the world so much I've gone home, closed all the curtains, and sat in the dark staring at the ceiling, shows the debt I owe to Schulz, as does everyone like me. Short of teaching us to cut down the arm instead of across, he showed a nation of depressives and misanthropes how it was done.

And the language! By making Charlie Brown and all the gang mature in their elocution and their sometimes philosophical conversational subjects, Schulz not only perfected a form of comedic contrast, he allowed himself the freedom to access all his big topics. Within every child, there is an adult waiting to get out, and within every adult there is still the child and the childhood that existed, and Schulz is able to access both vantage points whenever he chooses. Sometimes Charlie Brown is the child being openly loathed, and sometimes he's the adult scarred with self-doubt and anxiety caused by a tough childhood, but he always has the same language, the same body, in either case. It's only as I get older and realize what my childhood has made of me, that I see that Peanuts is very much about how the past and the present exist simultaneously for all of us, inside, in how we see ourselves.

I don't want to get all artsy-fartsy about this, but when Schulz made Snoopy stand upright (about eight years into the strip) and have the perfect life, the American dream, Schulz pretty much created a whole person in two halves. Charlie Brown endures and hopes, but rarely daydreams, whereas Snoopy is a creature of fantasy, pretending to fight the Red Baron, writing the Great American Novel, wooing and winning and, although never speaking, capable of communicating with others. While there's obviously a thin line between Son of Sam and his dog and Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Schulz's characters fall on the right side of that line, presenting the bond that exists between the dreamer and the damned, the hopeful and the hopeless. It also gave Schulz a way to stay in touch with his strip as he himself became more successful where he could be both Snoopy (hobnobbing with the elite) and Charlie Brown (appalled by the air of entitlement of that elite) simultaneously. Of course, people embrace the winner more than the loser, and Snoopy's popularity eclipsed Charlie Brown's. As time went on, Charlie Brown appeared less and less often, as Schulz became more and more comfortable with his life.

I'm always amused how people, taught and told over and over to "write what you know," carry this lesson to its natural conclusion. For example, watch how every stand-up comic who writes their own material develops a strong repertoire of airline jokes, taxi jokes, and hotel room jokes as they tour across the country trying to develop a name for themselves. Similarly, Peanuts became a repository for golf jokes, doctor and lawyer jokes, as Sparky no doubt spent a good chunk of his life hitting the links at the country club with said doctors and lawyers; by this time, a stranger to Peanuts (if you could find one) would have been mystified by a strip seeming to celebrate success in life with a dog and a bunch of small scratchy birds. It's a shame that English isn't a pictorial language like Japanese; one day, the word for wealth might be represented by a dog walking on its hind legs holding a golf club. And although I would prefer, instead, that the word for grief be that a round-headed kid holding his stomach, either option would in no way repay the debt we owe Charles Schulz for his legacy.

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