Charlie Brown is one of the most consistently unlucky characters in Western fiction. The degree to which life and the universe conspire to dump misfortune directly on his head is the beating heart of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. If you’ve got any problems at all, you can see what Charlie Brown’s up to and be slightly cheered up by the knowledge that at least you’ve got it better than him.
In almost 50 years, however, despite taking more Ls than a stuck typewriter, Charlie Brown almost never actually got mad about it. His style is more of a world-weary acceptance, verging on Zen calm. It’s left to other characters to rage, cry, and question their lot. That’s usually Lucy or Linus, but Charlie’s little sister Sally Brown gets in her own swings at the fundamental unfairnesses of childhood.
When modern fans talk about Peanuts, all of Sally’s best-remembered moments usually have to do with either her constant innocent windmill dunks on Charlie Brown or her deeply one-sided crush on Linus. On a reread, however, what really stood out about Sally is her antagonistic relationship with academia.
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Conjugate your verbs
Sally is Peanuts’ patron saint of unwilling students. Most of the rest of the Peanuts gang never seemed to mind their studies. (Patty isn’t good at school, but she didn’t actively resent it the way that Sally does.) If you were one of those kids who did their level best to try to wriggle out from under the burden of public schooling, Sally was your representation in the Peanuts crew.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Sally’s against learning. For that matter, Sally is almost as prone to suddenly busting out graduate-level Biblical scholarship as Linus.
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Your own library card
If you’re looking to put together a “best quotes” lineup for Sally, a safe lock for #1 is going to be “Happiness is your own library card” from April 26, 1963. That’s one of Sally’s best-known lines, ready-made for school walls and literacy drives, and you couldn’t go wrong if you considered it her most quotable line in the entirety of the strip.
Rereading some of Sally’s greatest hits today, there’s another strip that offers a useful moral for the internet generation, which Schulz couldn’t have known would be as useful as it is.
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Come correct or not at all
Sally Brown is one of the great all-time poor students in comics canon. Over the course of her appearances in the strip, her attempts to get out from under schoolwork through bluffs, short cons, and turns of phrase are legendary, although she’s never as sharp as someone like Calvin.
In the strip for June 11, 1987, Sally’s in the wrong, but at least there’s a decent moral involved. When she starts a letter by writing “Deer,” Charlie Brown tries to correct her, but Sally continues the sentence by writing the first sentence of what appears to be a term paper about deer.
As Sally yells at a rapidly-retreating Charlie Brown, “It seems to me that a lot of the problems in this world are caused by people who criticize other people before they know what they’re talking about!”
Then, once Charlie Brown is gone, Sally starts the letter over and writes “Dear Grandma,” just like he’d said.
It’s a fun joke, but it’s also a useful reminder. In the age of social media, it’s easier than ever to dive headlong into an incomplete conversation without a full idea of what’s being said. Let Sally Brown be your guide here, even though she was wrong: make sure to lurk more before you start posting. It’s a nearly 50-year-old strip that doubles as a solid way to avoid screwing up on Bluesky.
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