Charlie Brown, Freud and Oedipus

I

Charlie Brown & Charlie Schulz (by Lee Mendelson, in association with Charles M Schulz) was published in 1970 as a Signet book. R1.50, 6c tax, bought in the USA, in 1981.

It was the 21st anniversary of Peanuts. With Charlie, Lucy, Snoopy, Linus and his blanket, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Sally and “Peppermint" Patty as some of the characters.

Social commentary and life truths. Humour and seriousness.

Also, about the writing process with Snoopy who is still writing a novel and then smiling delightfully at his own cleverness.

“Once there were two mice who lived in a museum.” (Frame 1)

“One evening after the museum had closed, the first mouse crawled into a huge suit of armor.” (Frame 2)

In the third frame: “Before he knew it, he was lost. ‘Help,' he shouted to his friend.” In the fourth frame, Snoopy no longer writes and looks at the reader with self-satisfaction: “Help me make it through the knight!” (In Keep up the good work, Charlie Brown, Coronet 1975.) In another one (definitely satirical) he has to write about greed. Lucy reads what he writes and we see: “One of the secrets of good writing is to deal with real human emotions,” she says.

Suffers intimidation

Snoopy writes in the last frame: “Joe Greed was born in a small town in Colorado.”

Puns are his forte.

Lucy is bossy. Linus is her little brother. Charlie Brown suffers from an inferiority complex and suffers intimidation from Lucy multiple times.

We see Lucy with her address book and she scratches out someone's name. When she's done with someone, all that's left is a black spot. You see her obliterate the friend's name.

Linus makes a snowman and remarks to Charlie that his snowman loves poetry.

Charlie looks at the reading snowman and wants to know: “Robert Frost?”

Lucy scolds Linus who is playing with a small aeroplane in the house and may break a light. He replies: “Maybe I could blame it on society!”

The comic was marketed at the time as a gag a day.

But what do we learn from this humour? And exactly what are we laughing at?

II

Jerry Aline Flieger writes about the complex structure of the joke in “The Purloined Punchline: Joke as textual paradigm" in Robert Con Davis's Contemporary literary criticism published by Longman in New York in 1986. You become an accomplice. Part of the “joking chain", as she astutely puts it.

A joke has to remove something that gets in the way. A stereotypical view (we all remember the blonde jokes). Flieger uses the Oedipus story to read jokes: “Freud repeatedly reminds us that the joke always has something forbidden to say, and that the primary function of the joke-work is thus to disguise the joke's point – until its revelation in the punchline – and to soften its punch by ‘wrapping' it in acceptable form."(Con Davis, 1986: 281)

Oedipus accidentally killing his father and sleeping with his mother.

And she represents everything in a diagram.

Among the techniques of joking, Freud lists the following: analogy; distracting attention; a brief summary; compromise-making; displacement; double entendre; enumeration; exaggeration; intentional misreasoning; indirect representation; inversion; modification; frequent use of word material; pun intended ...

He names these in his miraculous study Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

III

Jokes are not innocent.

And why does Schulz use children as vehicles to convey truths of life? And a smart puppy? Franklin is a black kid: African American.

Is it perhaps because children lack agency, but can still spot lies? The original title before Peanuts was Li'l Folks.

There are, of course, other popular cartoons, such as Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. Still, time and again we return to this one.

And then the witty, writing dog. And Woodstock who is Charlie Brown's friend and you as a reader have to guess what he's saying.

The concept “security blanket” apparently originated in this comic.

Smart, delicious, but certainly not acerbic or below the belt. It did open the way for later comic strips to provide social commentary.

Cancel culture

As in our own Bitterkomix. Here, indeed, the jokes are tuned to Flieger's triadic structure. Always at the expense of something or someone. Also melancholic and painful; especially Anton Kannemeyer's contributions. Achingly satirical. And see how time has changed!

Schulz pioneered the representation of different readers: Snoopy as the parodic one; Lucy, perhaps, as the bitchy critic; Linus as the learned one and poor Charlie Brown probably the Ideal Reader, the one that every writer desires: the reader who will comprehend everything exactly as it was intended. Thus I noted in my study Postmodernisme in 1995.

If I were to teach my second-year course on jokes today, I would definitely get into trouble. Especially if the book Truly Tasteless Jokes were prescribed.

“Cancel culture" and all that stuff, you know.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”?

No more ...

♦ VWB ♦

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