10 Funniest Peanuts Comics That Just Turned 40

Summary

• Peanuts lore goes beyond familiar details, like a Peanuts-Disney crossover moment not widely known.
• Snoopy, a dog with unique perspectives, tricks Woodstock with false information about famous tubes.
• Lucy’s fear or vanity leads to mistakes on the baseball field, causing more losses for the Peanuts gang.

Peanuts has a long and varied history, with each year of the comic strip’s 50-year run adding new bits of lore and character details. Many pieces of Peanuts lore are pretty familiar to even casual fans of the comic strip, like Linus’ attachment to his security blanket or Lucy’s bossiness. However, some anecdotes of Peanuts lore are a lot lesser known, like a Peanuts-Disney crossover moment, albeit a small one.

While Peanuts may still hold some surprises for fans who have not been alive for the entirety of the comic strip’s publication, like the surprise connection between Snoopy and one Disney character, the comic strip still embraced its most consistent storylines and character traits throughout 1984. After being a very present part of American pop culture for 34 years by July 1984, Peanuts had a lot of running gags to lean on while still providing new stories.

10 “Woodstock Never Believes”

July 30, 1984

Snoopy has a very unique way of looking at the world. For a dog who has as many alternative personas as he does, he has to be a one of a kind individual with a rare outlook to be the type of pup he is. Snoopy gives Woodstock some inaccurate information, telling his good friend that two tubes he possesses are literally the same tubes that inspired the saying that something has “gone down the tubes.”

Fortunately, the little yellow bird does not believe Snoopy’s misinformation, annoying Snoopy but making Woodstock a little smarter in the process. It’s just like Snoopy to claim that he is the owner of the famous “tubes” from the saying, being perfectly in line with him giving a lot of his personas a “World Famous” prefix attached to them.

9 “The Highest Fly Ball”

July 28, 1984

The worst baseball player in all of Peanuts history, Lucy definitely holds a fair amount of the responsibility for the numerous losses the team has endured. Based on this comic strip, the team is all but guaranteed another loss based on Lucy’s actions in the strip. When a really high fly ball comes sailing Lucy’s way, she does not stay put and try to catch it like a halfway decent ball player would. Rather, she runs to the pitcher’s mound to stand with Charlie Brown.

Her excuse for abandoning her post is that she did not want to be in the outfield alone when the ball comes down, which is not exactly a great reason. Was it Lucy’s fear of failure prompting her actions or the worry that the fly ball would fall smack on her face? Either way, the team has no doubt garnered yet another loss.

8 “I Remember Your Face!”

July 19, 1984

As good as Charlie Brown is to Snoopy, the pup can sometimes take his owner for granted, and instead tends to see him as his servant, cook, and waiter. Thinking that he can pull a fast one over good old Charlie Brown and try to get a second helping of dinner, Snoopy is caught and rejected from getting more food. Snoopy is surprised, thinking he was sure to get away with it, since waiters don’t pay that much attention, according to the beagle.

Snoopy may love Charlie Brown, but that does not mean that the pup is always nice to him, especially when his food is involved. He clearly thinks of Charlie Brown as his waiter instead of his caring and loving owner who provides him with shelter as well as food. It could be said that Snoopy does his owner a bit of disservice by viewing Charlie Brown as just a meal ticket.

7 “This Doesn’t Taste Like Mint…”

July 22, 1984

Lucy relishes her role as big sister, bossing her little brothers around any chance she can get. When she gets a craving for ice cream, she enlists Linus with the special task of making it for her. She demands the ice cream flavor be mint, causing Linus to improvise when they only have vanilla ice cream and a green felt tip pen.

It does not take a doctor to assume that Lucy had better not eat any more of Linus’s “mint” ice cream unless she wants to ingest a whole lot of green ink. Linus is a bit of an oddball, so he tends to have his own way of doing things. However, his habit of walking to the beat of his own drum does not always work out for others, as seen in this case with Lucy and her toxic ice cream.

6 “It Was A Wide Door!”

July 4, 1984

While most members of the Peanuts gang act a little more mature than their years, Sally is very much the archetypal child. She always has questions, annoys her big brother, and misunderstands a lot of things about the world. Likewise, she tends to see things as they fit from her perspective, like spelling. After she misspells the word “door” with three “o”s, Charlie Brown corrects his little sister, only for Sally to reason that she spelled it with too many o’s because the door she is referring to was really wide.

Thinking that the spelling of a word can change based on the properties of the object in question is something completely in line with Sally’s personality and also a mistake that anyone could easily see being made by a kid still learning how to spell. The result is a funny and relatable comic for those who remember their spelling foibles as a child, or have kids of their own now who have spelling struggles too.

5 “Only One Little Part Bothered Me”

July 13, 1984

A love letter is always a wonderful thing to receive. However, a love letter does not hit the same way when one’s name is spelled wrong; it doesn’t exactly instill confidence about the feelings held by the letter sender. Snoopy finds himself in such a kooky situation when he gets a letter from his sweetheart and his name is misspelled. However, it still made him happy, which is pretty much what matters at the end of the day… kind of.

Surely, Snoopy would have been even happier had his name been spelled right. Snoopy has had some love interests over the years, with the possible love letter author of this comic being Genevieve, also known as Snoopy’s fiancé, who cheats on him all the time. Consequently, this love letter, with his name misspelled and all, is not the most romantic of letters.

Genevieve, on the day of her and Snoopy’s wedding, cheats on Snoopy with his own brother Spike, running away to the desert with him before leaving Spike for someone else too.

4 “I’m Not Young Yet!”

July 3, 1984

Linus and Charlie Brown are both pretty wise beyond their years. They are deep thinkers and often engage in some thought-provoking conversations. When Charlie Brown asks Linus if he ever took apples off a neighbor’s tree when he was young, Linus completely avoids the question. He instead focuses on the indignation he feels about being asked about when he was young, despite currently being a kid.

Linus thinks he is still just a kid, so he doesn’t have the option of reminiscing about when he was young. Linus does have a point, but everyone has some sort of past, even kids, so the reader can understand where Charlie Brown is coming from with his question too. Based on Linus’s reaction and the way he snaps at Charlie Brown, he is not too keen on growing up.

3 “I Was Just Curious”

July 1, 1984

Snoopy and his bird friends are as close as can be, with Snoopy serving as a leader to many of the birds and as the best friend to one bird in particular: Woodstock. However, their close ties do not mean that Snoopy is always welcome in bird business. When Snoopy’s curiosity gets the best of him and he sticks his nose into the birdhouse, he gets stuck, necessitating Charlie Brown to help him out of it.

Charlie Brown, understandably, thinks it is the dumbest thing his dog has ever done and wants to know why he did it. Though Snoopy is unable to give an answer directly to Charlie Brown, he reveals to the readers that he was curious about how the birds would play the current hand of a card game. Requiring some team work between Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Charlie Brown is ever the dutiful owner, as always, even if Snoopy’s actions do make him a bit angry.

2 “A Seed Tasting”

July 5, 1984

Best friends tend to do a lot of things together. However, it can be good to spend some time apart from time to time, especially when interests in a specific activity diverge. Snoopy and Woodstock, the best of friends, don’t hang out together when Woodstock invites Snoopy to a seed tasting, something Snoopy has no interest in.

Fun fact: Woodstock is one of the few
Peanuts
characters to have never had a TV special focusing specifically on him.

If it was a root beer tasting rather than seeds, Snoopy might go with Woodstock with bells on. However, there are some things only a bird can understand or enjoy, seed tasting evidently being one of those things. While Snoopy would rather lay about with his head resting on a rock, little Woodstock seems a bit disappointed that his best buddy is not going with him to his seed tasting. Regardless, the pair still have their numerous other activities that they do together.

1 “He Didn’t Answer”

July 10, 1984

Two iconic American properties that have been behemoths in pop culture are Peanuts and Disney. Charles Schulz gives a sly wink to the immense popularity of the properties in this funny comic. When Snoopy talks to Woodstock about the one and only Donald Duck, Snoopy tells a story about how he saw the hot-headed duck in California one time, but got ignored when he tried to say hello to Donald.

Fame apparently went to Donald Duck’s head, but it’s good to know that Snoopy stayed humble. Calling Donald Duck “old” in this comic strip when the bird was 50 years old, Snoopy has now surpassed his fifth decade as well. However, when this Peanuts comic was released in 1984, Snoopy was still a young, chipper 34 years old, enjoying his relative youth compared to the very famous duck, especially since he was given the cold shoulder by Donald in California.