The Futility of Hope: How Peanuts Became the Greatest Work of American Philosophy
A half-century of failure, capitalism and quiet existential horror in four panels
Classic Charlie Brown, Geilston Bay, Tasmania. August 2020.
The first-ever Peanuts strip, published on October 2, 1950, is a four-panel gut punch, a thesis statement so compact and devastating that Charles Schulz basically spent the next 50 years repeating it in increasingly refined variations.
Panel one: A round-headed, unsuspecting cherub – Charlie Brown – strolls down the sidewalk, exuding the blissful ignorance of someone who has not yet been fully introduced to the concept of suffering. On the sidelines, Shermy and Patty watch. “Well! Here comes good ol’ Charlie Brown!” Shermy announces, all smiles. Panel two: Charlie Brown continues walking, the embodiment of guileless optimism. Panel three: The smile falters – perhaps a premonition, some ancestral whisper that things are about to go south. Panel four: Betrayal. Shermy’s expression darkens. “How I hate him,” he mutters to Patty.
And there it is. That’s the joke. That’s Peanuts. That’s life. The brutal machinery of social existence condensed into four immaculate panels: the illusion of acceptance, the quiet cruelty of human nature, and the cosmic joke that is hope.
Forget childhood whimsy. This is not Norman Rockwell’s America, all wide-eyed wonder and lemonade stands. Peanuts was never about childhood; it was about the quiet, relentless grind of being alive. About disappointment, anxiety, alienation – the bleak absurdity of pressing forward when you know, deep down, the ball will always be yanked away at the last second. It’s about dragging your doomed kite to the park, knowing full well the Kite-Eating Tree will have the last laugh. It’s about fielding a baseball team so cosmically cursed that even Samuel Beckett might have found it a bit on the nose.
To dismiss Peanuts as just a comic strip is like dismissing Kafka as a guy who wrote about big bugs or Beckett as some dude who really liked waiting. No, Peanuts is one of the great artistic achievements of the modern era – an existential masterwork doled out in daily four-panel doses, a half-century-long exercise in distilled melancholy and comedic futility. Schulz took the Sisyphean absurdity of human suffering and rendered it in ink, in a format so seemingly innocuous that it snuck into the cultural bloodstream unchallenged.
And I am correct.
The Art of Simplicity: Schulz as a Minimalist Genius
Look at a Peanuts strip from the 1950s and witness Schulz’s brutal efficiency – no wasted lines, no decorative fluff, just the raw bones of despair drawn in tidy black ink. A fence? Merely suggested, a few deliberate strokes stand in for something that might offer security but never actually does. A baseball field? Not a place of camaraderie and victory, but an open, endless void, a green abyss where Charlie Brown stares down his latest failure and realises, yet again, that the universe does not give a single shit.
Adults don’t exist. Why would they? What wisdom could they possibly offer? What guidance could they give when they themselves are just children who got taller and learned how to pay taxes? No, Peanuts understood that true horror isn’t inflicted by stern fathers or disapproving teachers – your so-called friends mete it out. These people know exactly where your emotional soft spots are and tap them like a precision sniper. Schulz knew that oppression doesn’t require an authoritarian figure – all it needs is a playground, a loose social hierarchy, and the simple, ruthless mechanics of human nature.
Before Peanuts, comic strips were slapstick and melodrama – pies to the face, lovesick buffoons, dogs and cats inflicting cartoon violence on each other with zero emotional repercussions. Then Schulz came along and effectively nuked the medium from orbit.
He stripped it down to its barest essentials. Peanuts wasn’t loud. It didn’t scream for attention. It whispered like a quiet existential crisis that creeps up on you when you’re washing the dishes. The emotions weren’t blared out in grotesque facial contortions but lived in the subtlest shifts – a slight droop of Charlie Brown’s shoulders, an ellipsis hanging in the empty space between panels.
Schulz’s genius wasn’t in what he drew – it was in what he didn’t.
Peanuts wasn’t just drawn in negative space – it was sculpted from it. His panels were sparse, deliberately empty. Not because he was lazy, but because blankness is where the existential dread creeps in.
A character standing alone, staring into nothingness? That silence is saying more than dialogue ever could.
A conversation that just… stops? That unresolved tension lingers in the gut, settling in like an ache.
A strip where Snoopy just lies on top of his doghouse, staring at the sky? What is he thinking? We’ll never know. That’s the point.
Schulz understood that a single, unbroken line could cut deeper than a thousand overwrought brushstrokes. Try drawing Charlie Brown’s head. Go on. Try.
You will fail.
You will produce something that looks like a sentient peanut or a deflated balloon contemplating its own mortality. Because Schulz’s art wasn’t “simple.” It was precise. He made it look effortless, but it was anything but. His brilliance wasn’t just technical – it was philosophical. He didn’t just make comics. He made diagrams of human suffering.
He understood that life’s biggest emotional gut-punches don’t come in grand cinematic moments but in the small, unassuming ones. Charlie Brown standing alone after yet another failure? That isn’t just empty space around him – it’s the full weight of disappointment, pressing down like atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
Linus clinging to his security blanket? That’s not just a childhood habit – it’s the only thing standing between him and the void.
Schulz could render despair in a single frame and hope in a single pause.
This wasn’t just a comic strip.
This was existence, inked out in four-panel increments.
And that, right there, is why Peanuts is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the modern era.
This Peanuts strip is Schulz in peak form – small, unassuming, and quietly devastating. Four panels, a handful of words, and yet it neatly dissects human nature with the precision of a scalpel. There are no exaggerated expressions, no grand gestures – just an understated delivery of an observation so true it’s painful. We fear what we do not understand, but more than that, we mock what we do not understand. It’s easier. It’s safer. It’s a survival mechanism dressed up as confidence.
Schulz was a master of the small, profound moment – his strips rarely shouted, but they never needed to. This one takes a universal human tendency and presents it in its most distilled, undiluted form. And the beauty of Peanuts is that it doesn’t just apply to childhood. Swap out the kids for adults, and the dialogue still works. That’s Schulz’s genius. He didn’t need sweeping statements or elaborate metaphors. He could reduce the entire mechanism of human pettiness into four perfect panels. And he made it look easy.
Charlie Brown, Patron Saint of Existential Despair
Forget Sisyphus and his rock. Forget Hamlet whining into the void. Forget Gregor Samsa waking up to discover he’s a giant metaphor for alienation with a serious hygiene problem. The greatest absurdist protagonist of all time is a boy who just wants to kick a football.
Charlie Brown is the everyman, doomed to fail in a universe that barely notices his existence. He loses, constantly, spectacularly, with a consistency that would be admirable if it weren’t so deeply, cosmically bleak. His baseball team is a statistical crime scene. The girl he worships doesn’t even register him as sentient. His own dog – his one prescribed source of unconditional love – treats him like an unpaid intern. And still, he gets up every day and tries again.
Charlie Brown is not tragic. He’s not even a loser. He’s something much braver: a relentless idiot in the face of overwhelming evidence that he should stop. He lives in an endless cycle of:
Hope (This time, I’ll kick the football.)
Humiliation (I did not kick the football.)
Resignation (I will try again.)
Charlie Brown, the patron saint of doomed optimism, faces his old nemesis: not Lucy, not the football, but his own inability to learn.
It’s a perfect Schulz setup. Lucy is holding the ball, offering the bait. Charlie Brown, for once, is skeptical. No. Absolutely not. He knows the game, knows how this ends. And yet, she makes her case – she’s changed, she swears. Look at her face! Isn’t this the face of someone you can trust?1
Then comes the fall – both literal and metaphorical. The great WUMP! as his body is flung into the air, arms outstretched in one final, futile grasp at hope. And Lucy, ever the executioner of Charlie Brown’s delusions, delivers the closing line: I admire you, Charlie Brown… you have such faith in human nature. A eulogy for his dignity, offered by the very person who just shattered it.
This strip isn’t just about failure – it’s about the inherent cruelty of hope. The football gag is Schulz’s great recurring tragedy, an ever-looping parable of self-delusion. It’s not just that Lucy lies. It’s that Charlie Brown wants to believe her. He needs to believe her, because the alternative – accepting that the world is as cold and indifferent as it appears – would be too much. Schulz understood something most so-called optimists never do: hope isn’t beautiful. It’s not noble. It’s the ultimate cosmic joke, and we are all running at the football, knowing full well what happens next.
He is the human condition, boiled down to its most painful truth – hope is absurd. It’s a doomed act of defiance against a universe that does not care. It’s sprinting at that football, knowing Lucy has never – not once – let you have it. Yet, he persists. Charlie Brown isn’t just a comic strip character. He is us. That is Peanuts. The absurdity of hope.
If Charlie Brown is our fallen protagonist, then Snoopy is his cosmic counterweight – an untethered, indifferent force, gliding through life without a care for Charlie Brown’s relentless crucifixion.
Snoopy is a dog in the strictest biological sense, but spiritually, he is something far greater. A novelist. A World War I ace. A legend in his own mind. He does not live in Charlie Brown’s world – he transcends it. The cruel machinery of childhood has no grip on him. He fails, but failure does not touch him. When Charlie Brown suffers, he absorbs it. When Snoopy suffers, he edits the suffering out of the narrative.
Charlie Brown gets rejected. Snoopy rejects the rejection.
Charlie Brown is ignored. Snoopy declares himself the main character anyway.
Charlie Brown fails. Snoopy refuses to acknowledge the concept of failure altogether.
Snoopy is what we all wish we could be: effortlessly cool, eternally victorious, a walking delusion of grandeur that somehow works. When reality disappoints him, he changes it. His novel gets rejected? He critiques the critics. Bored of the backyard? He’s in the skies over France, locked in an aerial duel with the Red Baron.
Charlie Brown wishes he were cool. Snoopy announces he is cool and waits for reality to catch up.
Charlie Brown wonders if he’ll ever be loved. Snoopy assumes he already is.
One of them is more realistic. But which one is right?
That’s the genius of Peanuts. It offers both answers. Either you’re Charlie Brown, condemned to hope despite knowing better, or you’re Snoopy, arrogantly rewriting the world to fit your fantasy. One of them suffers. One of them thrives.
The Merchandising Machine: Does It Cheapen the Art?
One could argue that the relentless commercialisation of Peanuts – the lunchboxes, McDonald’s tie-ins, computer games, the theme park rides, the stuffed Snoopys that will eventually be found matted with dust and regret in an attic decades from now – somehow cheapens its artistic legacy.
That argument is not just wrong. It is embarrassingly, irredeemably stupid.
Schulz himself had the good sense not to lose sleep over the Peanuts industrial complex. He once shrugged: "How can they criticise a commercial enterprise for being commercial?" Translation: Of course Peanuts was a business! It was also a masterpiece. The two are not mutually exclusive. The strip was a product, sure. But so was the printing press, and last time I checked, no one was blaming it for ruining the Brontë sisters.
The idea that mass appeal dilutes artistic legitimacy is the last refuge of people who mistake obscurity for quality. By that logic, we should dismiss Shakespeare because his plays have been turned into fridge magnets, write off Van Gogh because his severed ear has been repackaged as a novelty keychain, and pretend that Dante’s Inferno ceased to matter the second someone turned it into a hack-and-slash video game where he battles demons with a scythe the size of a Nissan hatchback.
The sheer ubiquity of Peanuts might have actually sharpened its impact. While people were busy spooning cereal into their mouths and scanning the funny pages, they were unwittingly absorbing a crash course in existential despair. They thought they were reading a cute comic strip. They were, in fact, staring into the abyss.
Consider this strip: Snoopy, violin in hand, poised for artistic greatness. Snoopy doesn’t play so much as attack, a flurry of limbs and unchecked energy, a performance teetering between brilliance and absurdity. And then comes the punchline: Lucy, deadpan, delivering the most overused, meaningless question in art criticism: But is it art?
Schulz knew this game well. Snoopy is the artist as instinct – showman, craftsman, commercial juggernaut – while Lucy plays the eternal gatekeeper, reducing creation to an empty debate. The whole strip is a quiet mockery of the art world’s obsession with legitimacy.
Schulz blurred the line between mass appeal and artistic depth, turning Peanuts into a Trojan horse of philosophy and melancholy – all while selling stuffed toys. The existential dread didn’t vanish beneath the branding; it thrived. Peanuts became omnipresent, slipping its quiet despair into the culture so effortlessly that nobody even noticed. And that, ironically, is art.
In the grand tradition of philosophical sleight of hand, Peanuts pulled off an extraordinary trick: it smuggled existentialism into suburban breakfast nooks. Nietzsche’s void-gazing was too bleak, Camus’s sun-drenched nihilism too foreign, but Charlie Brown’s doomed attempts to kick that football? That was palatable. Digestible. Comforting, even, in its tragic familiarity.
Consider the elegant con job Schulz pulled off. Charlie Brown, eternally sprinting toward Lucy’s football, doomed to fail but trying anyway – an endless loop of hope and betrayal. Linus, theologian of the absurd, standing vigil for a godlike pumpkin that never arrives. Snoopy, the master of reinvention, retreating into fantasy whenever reality disappoints. Peanuts was less a comic strip and more a Trojan horse, delivering life’s bleakest truths under the disarming guise of primary colours and jazz piano.
Peanuts became a corporate behemoth – merchandised, monetised, plastered on every conceivable surface. Yet the existential dread didn’t disappear. If anything, it was preserved, amber-trapped in decades of Snoopy for President t-shirts and discount-store Christmas specials. The more commercial it became, the deeper its quiet nihilism burrowed into our collective psyche.
The irony would not have been lost on Charlie Brown.
Schulz’s absurdist masterpiece didn’t just infiltrate the culture – it became inescapable. It lodged itself into every home, every classroom, every fluorescent-lit department store Snoopy display. If the cost of making Peanuts one of the most widely consumed philosophical texts of the twentieth century is a few shitty snow globes, so be it.
After all, nobody questions Beethoven’s integrity just because Ode to Joy ended up in an advertisement for home loans. I refuse to question Peanuts just because somewhere in America, a bargain bin is still trying to offload unsold Charlie Brown Christmas pyjamas.
The End of Peanuts and the Finality of Art
When Charles Schulz died in 2000, Peanuts died with him. No ghostwriters, no corporate handover, no soulless resuscitation. It simply stopped. Because Schulz was Peanuts. Because all things end. That was the last joke, the final gut punch, the only way it could ever go.
For half a century, Schulz crafted one of the greatest artistic achievements of the modern era – an existential masterwork masquerading as a comic strip. It was profound philosophy in four-panel increments, an absurdist tragedy disguised as pop culture ephemera. He took the raw mechanics of suffering – hope, humiliation, and the audacity to try again – and rendered them with brutal, clinical precision.
And what is more American than that? The dream, the chase, the inevitable failure, all commodified, sold, and repackaged as childhood nostalgia. Peanuts was the American Dream laid bare – a relentless pursuit of something just out of reach, an economy built on disappointment, an existential crisis you can slap on a lunchbox.
So Peanuts ended exactly as it should have. Not with Charlie Brown finally kicking the football, not with some grand resolution, but simply with the last stroke of Schulz’s pen. The final panel faded to black.
And somewhere, off in the distance, Lucy held the football.
One last strip:
This is Peanuts in its purest, bleakest form. Charlie Brown, drowning in existential despair, staggers to Lucy’s psychiatric booth, desperate for some glimmer of understanding. For a moment – just a moment – Schulz lets him think it’s coming. Lucy gestures toward the vast, endless horizon: Look how big the world is! Look how much room there is for everybody! It’s almost uplifting. Almost. Then she lowers the hammer: Well, live in it, then!
That’s always the joke. You’re lost? You don’t belong? You feel like life is passing you by? Too bad. The universe does not care. There is no grand revelation, no guiding hand, no cathartic resolution. Just the indifferent sprawl of existence and a five-cent invoice for your suffering.
This strip is the Peanuts thesis: the search for meaning leads straight to a dead end, a world that refuses to explain itself, and the final insult of being charged for the privilege. Life is absurd. Hope is a scam. And at the end of it all, someone like Lucy will always be there, hand outstretched, waiting to collect.
The American dream.
Note: It was not.