Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On Facebook, Serene Vannoy has reminded her readers of this 1981 Peanuts cartoon, featuring Snoopy as an aspiring writer:

This cartoon is a favorite on writers’ websites, for obvious reasons: every writer has been rejected, usually many times (goodness knows I have), and it hurts. So it’s entertaining to see Snoopy’s childlike assumption that his intentions and desires should rule and his bafflement that other people don’t recognize this.

The original strip had a fourth panel, challenging his correspondent. Snoopy types:

Didn’t you realize that?

And then in the next strip, Lucy punctures Snoopy’s balloon by telling him that of course no one would publish his silly little stories. But the strip is, it seems to me, better without the follow-up, since it’s entirely from Snoopy’s point of view. Lucy’s retort is a cheap joke, a put-down repeated again and again in Peanuts, with various targets.

This entry was posted on April 14, 2012 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.