The American Spectator

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PEANUTS' SIDES br> Re: Brian Doherty's Good News, Charlie Brown /p>

Brian Doherty, thank you for making my morning! You took me back to my teenage boyhood days, when I'd come home from paper route to eat breakfast and read the comics, always featuring "Peanuts." Or spend an evening with a book -- sometimes one of those 1960s-'70s little paperback collections of several months' worth of "Peanuts" strips. I still have several of them someplace.

"Peanuts" did, and does, indeed possess huge charm. Security blankets stuck in washing machines, World War One flying aces lounging in root beer halls, notes from Beethoven's symphonic staffs conking gauche females... I smile as I type this! I too recall that "good ol' Charlie Brown.... How I hate him!" line.

I must take respectful, partial issue with one aspect of the review. I guess I agree that individual "Peanuts" strips, and sometimes even a story line of many strips, can often sound a negative tone. That probably describes the early strips as I recall them. In the early '50s Charles Schulz's characters did indeed reflect those times: not much fantasy or even basic humor, rather more of a skeptical, sometimes cutting cynicism. (Closest comparative coming to mind is Bill Watterson's "Calvin & Hobbes," in its way a very funny strip.) This kind of approach attracts such (often pseudosophisticate) audience groups who imagine those characteristics as their own: college students, urban liberals, organization types. Once formed, preferences tend to stick.

But I can't agree that "Peanuts" "never gave us...uplift or a happy ending." By the period of the strip's "maturity" (late '50s to '70s, as you note), that element did enter. For all the world-weariness, "Peanuts" rose above it. In the process the strip attracted a much broader audience, with different tastes that Mr. Schulz began to serve. I think several factors influenced the strip's growth, both of character and audience (the two certainly correlate: imagine most American men laughing at the female-aimed strips "Cathy" or "For Better For Worse").

First, and uniquely for comic strips of the '60s, "Peanuts" characters began to demonstrate implicit, and sometimes explicit, Christianity. Linus (the only Biblical name in the strip) particularly serves as the strip's "prophet center" and moral anchor, given to quoting Scripture to various interlocutors. Schroeder also helps here, rebelliously pounding out "classical" music from a lost Christian-dominated era instead of mindless and lascivious "pop" tunes. Mr. Schulz's commitment to eternal Truth, I believe, tied the strip to both this world and the next in a *positive* way. In the process he won for his characters whole new legions of heartland readers -- people distressed at the relativism, nihilism, and hedonism dominating our society from the '60s on. Some fading of this wholesome emphasis on Greater Issues also, I think, helps explain the strip's decline in the 80's and 90's.

Second, the fantasy element rising in "Peanuts" in the late '50s introduced the strip to all minds that appreciate creativity and genuine humor. The true font or "sense" of humor in man arises out of his perceptions of absurdity in his situations, particularly in extremities. We laugh because we see silliness round about us, and in our own selves. In comic strips absurdity takes two basic forms in pursuit of humor:

1) real-seeming people find themselves in wildly unrealistic situations (e.g. the sight gags of "Blondie" showing Dagwood's outrageous sandwiches and his constantly crashing into the mailman while late for work).

2) totally unrealistic and absurd creatures engage in "real-world" human life (think "Garfield" needing his morning coffee to feel feline).

The "best" strips employ both forms -- longrunning success of "Blondie" and "Garfield" demonstrate the overlap. "Peanuts" clearly belongs in the overlap group: a dog lives on his house roof, suffering existential angst and fantasizing about being a lawyer or a fighter pilot; a child runs to kick a football held and then pulled away by his playmate, and flips head over heels from the effort, again and again and again.

p>I look forward to your future reviews of the rest of the Series! br> --

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