Good Man, Interrupted

By: Matthew Battles
March 29, 2011

Mentioned on Twitter today by HiLobrow contributor (and indispensable twitteur) Tim Carmody, 3eanuts is a tumblr dedicated to the proposition that removing the last panel from most Peanuts comics unveils a world in which “despair pervades all.” 3eanuts blogger Daniel Leonard argues that the Schulz’s 4th-panel humor and the strip’s sentimental marketing combine to mask the horror with which the Peanuts characters contend:

The concluding punchline distances readers emotionally from the misery that precedes it; jokes turn us from co-sufferers into onlooking wise guys. Schulz was well aware that the dismal content of Peanuts, which is to say the stuff of life, is difficult to face without humor to aid us. By removing the final gag panel, we bring to the fore exactly how dark Schulz’s view of the world has always been.

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Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, misery, Peanuts, tumblr

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Good Man, Interrupted

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