The Theology of <i>Peanuts</i>, Prelude: Is <i>Peanuts</i> Funny?

Images from The Complete Peanuts by Fantagraphics Books

Charles M. Schulz produced the Peanuts comic strip from 1950 to 2000. Every week, during those fifty years Schulz created five daily strips and one Sunday strip. Schulz never once farmed out the duty, drawing and penning himself each installment of Peanuts. The sheer volume and quality of the Peanuts strip has rightly earned Schulz the title of genius. No comic strip creator, before or since, has said so much, so well, and for so long. In the history of world literature, as one cultural critic has noted, "the saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and Linus is arguably the longest story told by a single artist in human history." (1)

It might seem odd to seek theological edification from a comic strip. So, to begin, an apologia.

The theological richness of Peanuts can be hinted at by beginning with an intriguing question, "Is Peanuts funny?" The answer is yes, of course. But we quickly must nuance that answer by noting that Peanuts is funny in a very dark and peculiar manner. The darkness of Peanuts was signaled in the very first Peanuts strip published on October 2, 1950 (shown above). Charlie Brown walks innocently past two children sitting on the curb. As Charlie Brown approaches and passes by the little boy repeatedly intones, "There goes good ol' Charlie Brown." And yet, as soon as Charlie Brown exits the picture, the boy gives us the punch-line: "How I hate him!" Peanuts is funny. But it is also dark and mean and tragic.

Where does this meanness come from? Umberto Eco, in his introductory essay to the first Peanuts book published in Italian, made this analysis:

"The children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: They are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of the modern industrial civilization...In [these children] we find everything: Freud, mass-cult, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest." Peanuts is an "encyclopedia of contemporary weakness."

In Peanuts the words "depressed," "cynical" and "sarcastic" were given prominence in a comic strip, a supposedly "funny" medium, like never before. The "security blanket" was created in the strip. Charlie Brown, chronically depressed, often expressed suicidal thoughts. In many strips all we witness is Charlie Brown absorbing verbal abuse. Even Schulz declared that "maybe I have the cruelest strip going." (2) Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes agreed: No other comic strip, he felt, "presented a world so relentlessly cruel and heartless." (3) Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, characterized the tone ofPeanuts as "casual cruelty." (4)

Images from The Complete Peanuts by Fantagraphics Books

Love does not come easy in Peanuts. As David Michaelis, Schulz's biographer, has noted, "In [Schulz's] work, indifference would be the dominant response to love. When his characters attempt to love, they are met not just by rejection but by ongoing cold, even brutal, indifference, manifested either as insensitivity or as deeply fatalistic acceptance."

Yet Peanuts contains more than interpersonal meanness. Peanuts is a prolonged mediation on the multifarious sources of human pain and suffering. In Peanuts "all the loves are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away." (5) The signature gag-line of Peanuts, the last words of the last panel, is often just a sigh. Which is puzzling. Can Peanuts be funny if the gag-line is a sigh? Mort Walker, the creator of the comic Beetle Baily, expressed this sentiment: "[Schulz] was doing something different, and it was hard to understand. I'd read Peanuts some days and at the end it was just 'Sigh.' I'd think, 'That's not a gag line. What's he doing?'" (6)

In sum, then, we find in Peanuts an extended meditation on pain, suffering, and alienation. As Eco notes, Peanuts is a "version of the human condition." Thus, the primary theological thrust of Peanuts centers on these themes.

Images from The Complete Peanuts by Fantagraphics Books

Peanuts is theological because, in a very real sense, Peanuts isn't funny. We often laugh with Peanuts because we identify with it. We encounter the shock of pain in Peanuts and recognize it. And that intimate familiarity with our deepest pains, longings and insecurities makes us smile. And even laugh. We have been understood. And this comforts us.

But to be properly theological Peanuts must do more than simply portray our suffering. Peanuts must have some positive message. And it does. But before that message is heard we must first fully encounter the deep tragedy and cruelty of Peanuts. Otherwise, the wisdom of Peanuts will seem trite, facile, and cute. We must read Peanuts as Christians. Which is to say that we adopt the dialectic of death and resurrection. Death first, then resurrection. Only if we first immerse ourselves in the pain of Peanuts will its positive arguments appear wise and deep.

For Peanuts does portray more than pain and cruelty. There is companionship, joy, endurance, and heroism. The protagonist of Peanuts, of course, is Charlie Brown. Eco calls Charlie Brown "a moment of the Universal Consciousness," "a Hero of Our Time," "Everyman," and the "Jeremiah of the strip-Bible." High praise indeed. Charlie Brown earns this recognition because, as the dramatic locus of the Peanuts theological system, we watch him endure pain, loneliness, rejection, meanness, humiliation, and failure of every kind. And yet, in his Sisyphisian persistence Charlie Brown becomes noble and heroic. Somehow, despite his chronic suicidal angst, Charlie Brown never loses faith. As Michaelis writes, "Charlie Brown handles without self-pity insults that would push real children to the breaking point...Schulz's characters reminded people of the never-ceasing struggle to confront one's vulnerabilities with dignity. Humanity was created to be strong; yet, to be strong and still to fail is one of the universally identifying human experiences. Charlie Brown never quits..." (7)

Images from The Complete Peanuts by Fantagraphics Books

And beyond Charlie Brown's Herculean feats of endurance we also encounter the spirituality of Linus and the joy and eros of Snoopy (Snoopy, we should note, is the only one who kisses in Peanuts). In sum, if we take the cruelty of Peanuts seriously we will also find resources for positive theological contemplation. Specifically, how can community, joy, and peace emerge in a cruel and competitive world?

This online book is my attempt to use Peanuts to answer that question.


Notes:
(1) p. 222. Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis
(2) p. 272. Ibid.
(3) p. 544. Ibid.
(4) p. xii. The Complete Peanuts, 1955-1956. Fanatagraphics Books.
(5) The Art of Peanuts edited by Chip Kidd
(6) p. 274. Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis
(7) p. 189. Ibid.