The fourth volume of Peanuts was the one where everything just made click. I wasn’t sure if it would eventually happen or whether Schulze’s humor really wasn’t to my liking. But I’m sort of thankful that it eventually did, because not getting why everyone else seemed to love Peanuts made me doubt the greater humanity, especially as the first two collections were god awful and the third still kinda mediocre. But this time around the jokes were funny, I felt compelled to read the entire collection in one sitting and couldn’t wait to open the next one.
I’ve read a number of personal recollections of other people appreciating the Peanuts in recent times and I think one reason why I had such a hard time liking Peanuts initially is that most people seem to like Peanuts because they can empathize with Charlie Brown, Snoopy or any of the other characters to some degree. It’s a Zeitgeist thing to which I am not partial. For me, it’s like looking at an alien world that doesn’t make much sense.
I can laugh at the individual strips, sometimes like the point Schulze is making, but the overall theme of prevailing failure and trying to get accepted by the world at large, a world that seems overly hostile from Charlie Brown’s POV seems pretty artificial and doesn’t hold any deeper meaning for me. I may laugh at the surface, but what is beneath it is written in a language I don’t know.
