Last week, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts turned 64. TIME magazine ran two stories about Peanuts: See How Peanuts Addressed Feminism, Nuclear War and More and Why Peanuts Endures: ?The Football is Always Pulled Away?
From TIME Magazine:
Despite their wholesome, all-American reputation, Charlie Brown and his friends embody an amount of malaise better associated with French existentialists. Over nearly 50 years and more than 18,000 comic strips, Peanuts made punchlines out of loss and futility. The joke was on humanity. And it started right away: creator Charles Schulz relied on themes like unrequited love and the cruelty of children as early as the comic?s newspaper debut on this day, Oct. 2, in 1950.
Every time I read that “Peanuts” was about loss, failure, and futility, I think about the countless times Schulz would explain the why of a strip or a character by simply saying, “Because it was funny.” I never see enough written about Schulz the humorist, the very funny, witty cartoonist he was. If what he drew or wrote wasn’t funny, out it went. Beethoven was funny, pulling away the football was funnier than getting to kick it, etc. That’s why when I read my daily comics, “Peanuts” is still the strip most likely to make me laugh hard. Great humor is timeless.