Print
Email
Share
Who could have guessed that 50 years down the line in 2007, there actually would be a comedy show called The Office? And that deadpan, cornball humor, exactly of the kind to be found in this 1957 cartoon strip would be its trademark? Certainly not Charlie Brown. Nor his prodigious creator, Charles Schulz.
Approaching the second decade of the second millennium, it is hard to miss the cultural impact of Schulz’s Peanuts. Three generations now have grown up in a world where Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, and Good Ol’ Charlie Brown have been part of their world for much longer than they themselves. More than a literary staple, Peanuts has become a permanent fixture of popular culture. In time, as with all enduring cultural objects, Charlie Brown and the Gang have become the fuel for these generations having dreams and writing popular culture of their own.
Fifty years down the line, it becomes very easy to celebrate Schulz’s achievement by saying, ‘Without Peanuts there would be no…’. This cry can be completed in any number of ways. No Rugrats, no Dilbert, no Calvin & Hobbes, no Boondocks. No TV show called The Office. But making this claim while living in a world where Peanuts culturally predominates, also means losing something of the vitality and vibrancy of Schulz’s original work.
Just beginning to write in the mid-‘50s, Schulz could not have guessed at the overwhelming success that awaited him, nor at the popular and critical reception still to come for his work. Schulz’s Charlie Brown was not the Charlie Brown of our era. Peanuts was slow, and deliberate, just as Charlie Brown was the kid who always got out of bed late at night to feed Snoopy, no matter his own fear of the dark or neuroses around social failure. And like his fictional analog, Charles Schulz was the guy who drew a comics strip, everyday for fifty years.
It is this enduring spirit that would propel Peanuts well beyond the newspaper funny pages and into the popular imagination. Writing in the Introduction to second volume of The Complete Peanuts Jonathan Franzen reminds us, ‘Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life—to grind out a strip everyday for 50 years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this—is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason that Schulz’s early sorrows look like “sources” of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them’.
