Charles M. Schulz Played Favorites: “I Don’t Especially Like” Lucy

Time and again, Lucy Van Pelt engaged in shady business with neighborhood kid Charlie Brown, offering to hold a football to kick only to pull it away at the last moment. Good ol’ Charlie would fly up in the air, landing on his back while somehow avoiding permanent spinal injuries. These days, he’d be encouraged to go to therapy but in the heyday of the Peanuts comic strip, the only help available was from Lucy herself. She charged him a nickel for her lousy advice. 

It was hard to muster up positive feelings for the crabby fussbudget, both for readers and Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. In a 1967 interview with Psychology Today included in the compilation Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, he confessed that “Lucy is not a favorite, because I don't especially like her, that's all. But she works, and a central comic-strip character is not only one who fills his role very well but who will provide ideas by the very nature of his personality.”

Schulz’s favorite characters were Snoopy, Linus and Charlie Brown — kinder, gentler citizens of the Peanuts world. But they’re all the sweeter in contrast with Lucy, making her an important part of the strip’s dynamic. “This is why Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, and Lucy appear more than the others. Their personalities are so broad and flexible that they provide more ideas.”

The character was intended as a switch on traditional gender roles, according to Schultz — a reversal that might have resonated more in the 1960s than in the 2020s. "There is nothing funny about a little boy being mean to a little girl. That is simply not funny!” he contended. “But there is something funny about a little girl being able to be mean to a little boy." 

OK then.

While Lucy wasn’t likable, she did have an impressive bullshit meter. “You have to give her credit though; she has a way of cutting right down to the truth,” Schultz said. “This is one of her good points. She can cut through a lot of the sham and she can really feel what's wrong with Charlie Brown which he can't see himself.”

Not that her insights do Charlie Brown much good. Lucy tormented him to the very end of the strip. In a December 1999 interview with Al Roker, Schultz choked back tears as he remembered signing his final Peanuts strip. “All of a sudden I thought, ‘You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick—he never had a chance to kick the football.’”