From the vault of Sports Illustrated, a profile of the beloved Charles Schulz.
From the piece...
Like his most famous character, Schulz has an easy face and soft eyes that radiate humility and self-doubt. He speaks with gentle humor, quoting Charlie Brown's warm, chuckly aphorisms as if they'd been uttered by a real person. "As Charlie Brown said," Schulz says mildly, "I thought I had life solved, but there was a flag on the play."
Sports may be the biggest thing in Charlie Brown's world. Certainly they account for Peanuts' undying popularity. Season after season, Charlie Brown takes the mound bursting with pride and hope; year after year, Lucy smirkingly yanks the football away just as he's about to kick it.
Sports allow Schulz to move freely from childish games to adult concerns. They provide him with an easy way to express frustration. He often twists sports clichés to make all sorts of little commentaries on life. "Winning isn't everything," Linus says consolingly. "But losing isn't anything," answers Charlie Brown.
Losing, in fact, is Peanuts in a nutshell. "Winning is happy," notes Schulz, "but happy isn't funny."
A theologian once observed that Charlie Brown's pose on the mound is not unlike that of Job on the ash heap. Schulz doesn't dismiss the parallel, but he doesn't dwell on it, either. He says simply that he likes the contemplative quality of baseball, of a pitcher rubbing the ball with two out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.
Schulz himself has a sad and sentimental way of looking at the most innocuous event. Take, for instance, a ball game on TV. The home team builds an insurmountable lead; the camera pans the visitors' dugout and zooms in on a player. "I think, 'Is this guy really happy trapped with a miserable team far away from home?' " Schulz says. "He has to go back to a lonely hotel and brood about losing. How can he stand it? It bothers me. It's ridiculous, of course, but it bothers me."
No comments:
Post a Comment