Advertisement

The Saddest Sunday for the Funnies

Share

From time to time at a newspaper in the Midwest, the editor would amuse himself by dropping a comic strip. There would be no announcement, no explanation. A reader would turn to the usual page and one of the comics would be gone: “The Wizard of Id,” “Mary Worth,” “The Phantom,” whatever. He’d just kill one at random.

A day or two would go by; maybe a week. The editor would sit back and wait, to see if anyone complained.

Like the time “Nancy and Sluggo” bit the dust.

It was OK by me. I had never encountered a soul who cared about either Nancy or Sluggo. I’m not sure I could tell you which of them was Sluggo. No child I knew wore Nancy clothing, or slept on Sluggo bedsheets. So goodbye and good luck, Nance, Slug.

Advertisement

By the following week, their strip was back.

“We got 500 calls,” the editor told me.

Five hundred calls for Sluggo?

“Yep,” he said. “Do you know how many calls we would get if we dropped you from the paper?”

How many?

“Not 500,” he said.

*

I have never been an aficionado of the funnies. I’ve always been more partial to editorial cartoonists, and have had the privilege of being a colleague to some of the greats, from Bill Mauldin to Paul Conrad. A cartoon of Bill Clinton always makes me laugh harder than a cartoon of Dagwood, with or without their wives.

But even for a strip skipper such as me, who doesn’t know his Heathcliff from his Garfield, there was one comic’s perpetual popularity that was never a mystery. The appeal of “Peanuts” was as universal as anything I have ever seen in a newspaper. And that includes crossword puzzles, supermarket coupons and unfunny humor columnists.

So when I first heard that the creator of Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy was seriously ill, it got to me, it really did. Charles Schulz was an American original, as responsible as Walt Disney and Jim Henson in the 20th century for family entertainment that would endure in centuries beyond. He was a cut-up without ever needing to be cutting edge, totally square yet totally hip.

And when he died last weekend, just as his farewell drawings were appearing in full color throughout the civilized world, it was the saddest Sunday with the funnies a newspaper reader ever spent.

Few of us in print could conceive of what it was like to be Charles and his cartoon alter ego, Charlie, being syndicated in 2,600 newspapers without a whit of controversy, never once being the teeniest bit offensive or too clever for his own good. No one ever accused Schulz of doing something “to sell more papers,” even though he seemed to be featured in practically every paper sold.

Advertisement

“Peanuts”--the name Schulz disliked that was foisted on him by an editor--might have been too bland for every taste, but it was never distasteful. It might depict a little girl making a little boy fall on his skull, but nobody to my knowledge penned letters accusing the cartoonist of making fun of a head injury. Nobody called his “5-cent psychiatry” booth an insult to the emotionally disturbed. Nobody felt that “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” mocked the heroes who gave their lives in World War I.

It once occurred to me that Warner Bros. cartoons are rife with characters with speech impediments--Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy, Porky, Elmer and Foghorn Leghorn each have lisps or stammers--so that even a beloved animated menagerie could theoretically come under fire. Schulz’s creations had no such challenges. (Although I half-expect today to get mail questioning Charlie Brown’s premature pattern baldness or Linus’ twisted 50-year obsession with a blanket.)

As for Snoopy, the worst flaw that dog ever had was sitting with his typewriter, afflicted with writers’ block.

*

I dare say our old editor never experimented by dropping “Peanuts” from the paper, because of the 500 phone calls he would have received . . . over the next 15 minutes.

Schulz’s comic strip was a habit millions began their day with, like the brushing of teeth. It was one of those best-things-in-life-are-free things that most of us took for granted, never giving a second thought. The only way anyone would take special notice would be if the man who worked for “Peanuts” suddenly wasn’t around anymore.

There used to be a popular expression, used by people saying so long: “See you in the funny papers.” No one says it today. And the funnies aren’t so funny today.

Advertisement

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com.

Advertisement