Stop pretending Peanuts is or ever was funny

(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)

“Well! Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown!”

“Good ol’ Charlie Brown … Yes, sir!”

“Good ol’ Charlie Brown …”

“How I hate him!”

That was the first strip in the most venerable comic in American history, and how we went from that to anything that last more than, I don’t know, a week, I’ll never know.

Comic strips are a struggling medium these days, because, you know, newspapers are a struggling medium. But there are standouts, both current and past. Calvin & Hobbes is of course an all-timer, but Pearls Before Swine, FoxTrot, Doonesbury, and so many others have either always been good or at least had their moments. And yet, Peanuts is considered the cornerstone of our societal comic views.

Meanwhile, Family Circus is treated (not entirely unfairly) as a schmaltzy cute-fest. I will posit right here, today, that *at the minimum*, Family Circus and Peanuts are equal when it comes to comedy, and if you made me choose one, Family Circus wins every time.

To test this, I googled “funniest Peanuts strip” and “funniest Family Circus strip” and checked the first entry on both. Scientific? Nope. But this ain’t no scientific study. Here were the results:

Again, obviously inconclusive. But I think anyone looking objectively at these two entries would have to come down on the Family Circus side. And think back to your Peanuts memories. Not one of them, I’ll bet, involves you laughing. Maybe you remember cuteness, or the poignancy of the TV cartoons, or the MetLife blimp, or … I don’t know, any number of things. It’s inarguably cute, inarguably nostalgia-laden. What Peanuts is definitely NOT is funny. Prove me wrong.

The decline of the “funny pages” is sad. But you can still read Pearls Before Swine, you can go back to Calvin & Hobbes, you can even find some Garfield highlights or check out Garfield Minus Garfield, which is a masterwork. You should do all those things. And when you feel like giving a small smile and remembering your childhood fondly, sure, give Peanuts a look.

Just please, don’t pretend like it is, was, or even has been funny.