Seventy-five years after the Peanuts comic’s initial release, Charles Schulz’s daughter offers insight on the linguistics behind the characters’ humor.
“If you read the strip, you would know me. Everything I am goes into the strip––all of my fears, my anxieties, and my joys.” —Charles Schulz
The Peanuts gang has offered comfort and comedy to audiences since the first comic strip’s release in 1950. In the fifty years that followed, the comic’s writer and illustrator, Charles Schulz, received numerous accolades for his work and became known as a “genius” for the stories and characters he created. Now, as the strip’s seventy-fifth anniversary approaches, Schulz’s daughter, Amy Schulz Johnson (Linguistics MA ’25), is using her father’s work on the Peanuts comic strip as the basis of her master’s thesis. With her background in linguistics, Johnson hopes to contribute to her father’s legacy by studying the linguistic devices that make up the language in Peanuts.
Linguistics All Around
Johnson read all 17,000 strips written during Charles Schulz’s lifetime, but she narrowed her research focus down to the 2,000 comics containing the most linguistic devices. She cataloged the devices she ran into, focusing specifically on twenty of the most repeated ones. Johnson says, “Almost everything I learned about in linguistics, Dad did on a comic strip. I find that fascinating because he didn’t know anything about linguistics.”
Johnson initially anticipated finding linguistic devices in only Sally’s speech, since her character is known for her comedic blunders. However, Johnson found her dad’s comics riddled with all sorts of unique devices used by each of the characters. “I read [the comic strips] straight through, and then I was finding all sorts of wordplay,” she says. These devices came in the form of idioms, a mondegreen (a misinterpreted phrase that gets new meaning), and more.
As an example of her findings, one strip shows Sally writing a school report on vandalism where she declares the leader of vandals to be “evandalists,” a word created by mixing the word vandalism with evangelists. “Dad does that a lot with Sally because she’s always saying things wrong,” Johnson recalls. In another strip, Sally tries to recite A Visit from St. Nicholas and mistakenly refers to Jack Nicklaus instead of St. Nicholas. “Jack Nicklaus was the most famous golfer when my dad was an adult,” Johnson explains. “I think this is important because Dad couldn’t have come up with that if he had not lived in the era of Jack Nicklaus.”
Johnson found interesting linguistic elements in other characters as well. In one strip, when an upset Charlie complains about eating “bare soup,” Patty erroneously believes he dislikes bear soup until he clarifies, explaining that he has no crackers to eat with his food. This example demonstrates Schulz’s mastery of language as he played with the concept of homophones (two words that sound the same but have different meanings) to create comedic misunderstandings.
Redefining Charles Schulz
Charles Schulz’s ability to incorporate linguistic devices without a background in linguistics points to a concept known as tacit knowledge, or the unconscious understanding of language rules and structures. “He’s using these things to be funny, but he doesn’t even know what they’re called,” Johnson says.
Johnson hopes that her research on the Peanuts comic strip will open many doors for her in the future as a researcher and even as an author herself. Being the first linguist to search all 17,000 of Charles Schulz’s comics for linguistic devices has given her the unique opportunity to combine her roles as both a student and a daughter: “I want to add to his legacy, and I can combine what I learned [in linguistics] with my love and respect for Dad’s comic strip.”
Learn more about the linguistics master’s program here.