Ramanujan Redux

My favorite comic growing up was not Garfield, not Calvin and Hobbes (which I would not learn to appreciate until much later), not Dilbert. Nope, it was them Peanuts.

Thanks to the power of the YouTubes, I’ve revisited Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and the gang. And while I might have been amused by it as a kid, watching it through adult eyes left me with some fresh new perspectives. Let’s start with the most important.

Dear God, is poor Charlie Brown miserable.

First of all, he’s close to bald as drawn, which is doubly ironic because his dad is a barber. Who can conceive of such cruelty where all he needs is a snip of hair?

Charlie Brown never wins a baseball game. Never. When his team does win, it’s only because Linus pitches for him. Perhaps there is some moral to the story (pitching isn’t your thing kid). When you lose 930 games, you might want to think of moving to the outfield. He tries flying a kite only to have gravity take it down every damned time. I can imagine this being perfect for kid-readers from generation to generation, but being older makes me a little bit more exasperated. Can’t he get that damned kite up at least once?

And of course, his peers are unbelievably brutal to him. If I had to live up to the perceptions of the Lucys and the Violets of the world, I’d have to be checked into an institution somewhere. I went through some rough stuff as a teenager, but it’s nothing compared to what poor Charlie Brown goes through. This kid gets beaten, called a “loser”, gets berated for being ugly, having no talent, etc. etc. Children can be cruel, but this sort of pressure on one kid borders on sadism. And the result is the typical “AUGGGGHH!” kid that we’re all aware of who mopes around.

And then there’s that football. I guess there’s something endearing about this part of the story, because at least Lucy uses the old psychological tricks and suckers poor Charlie Brown in. The true hustler, Lucy suckers poor Charlie Brown in everytime from a new angle with the same promise: “maybe it’s my time, right now”. And of course, it isn’t. Determinism at its most depressing.

Yet, through all these tribulations, there are times when Charlie Brown can be happy. And those moments leave you smiling the rest of the day. Perhaps you can never truly understand what happiness is until you’ve hit the bottom, to find the times when all is right to realize what that means. And that might be what being the Charlie Browniest is all about.

There’s a biography out there about Charles Schulz that deals into his psychology and that he himself embodies many of these self-pitying qualities of his protagonist. It might be worth taking a look at.

PS: Hollly crap, this artist is amazing. I guess I should say, “Good Grief.”

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.