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I agree that Peanuts isn't funny, but it's darker than it looks. If happiness is a warm puppy in the Peanuts-verse, it's because people are often cruel and hateful, and life is full of endless disappointment. Just like Garfield, really, in that it's supposedly light fare that's deeply melancholic under the surface.

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I 'read' a friend's compendium of Peanuts and was shocked at the cruel, dark humor of the initial years. It really was aimed at adults until Snoopy started to become more prominent and the strips played for laughs rather than insight into society.

I read some of the Peggy Jean (Charlie Brown's girlfriend from 1990-1999) strips. It's brilliant comic gold, filled with both hope and cruelty throughout. I don't think Schultz ever played anything for just laughs. His brilliance was he captured all parts of humanity, light and dark, in his strips, even until the end.

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