Almost 27 years later, it’s still considered a missed opportunity that Charles Schulz never let Charlie Brown successfully kick the football. This annual gag in Peanuts, where Lucy would hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick before pulling it away at the last second, has inspired responses from generations of humorists. Everyone from Peter Griffin to Spider-Man has been depicted as helping Charlie Brown finally get one over on Lucy.
There are actually a couple of obscure moments in Peanuts history where Charlie Brown did kick the football, such as in one of the lesser-known animated specials, but the football gag remains a useful summarization of Lucy’s overall role in Peanuts: she’s the character that readers loved to hate.
Lucy is primarily defined by her petty cruelties, her one-sided romance with Schroeder, and her frequent attempts to get her brother Linus to conform to Lucy’s idea of how things ought to be. At her best, you can tell that she’s simply not good at showing genuine affection. She is, after all, nebulously somewhere between five and seven years old, and is one of the rare Peanuts characters who’s allowed to consistently act like it. At her worst, however, Lucy is wholly insufferable. Not even Schulz, by his own admission, particularly liked Lucy, but her various foibles made her a rich character for a gag-a-day comic strip.
As a result, Lucy’s most memorable lines in Peanuts are generally punchlines, overreactions, or casual unkindness, the latter of which is usually at Charlie Brown’s expense. She doesn’t have the knack for casual philosophy that Linus exhibits, or even Charlie Brown’s depressive Zen. While one of the most frequently-quoted lines in Peanuts, “Happiness is a warm puppy” (April 25, 1960), is originally from Lucy, that only just manages to put her on the memorability leaderboard.
Lucy’s best Peanuts quote
Having said that, there’s one particular strip, from Nov. 27, 1970, that might be Lucy’s most understandable moment. It’s not her funniest appearance or her best quote, but it’s a moment of frustration that many of us can remember when we were a kid.
The strip in question is a monologue by Lucy, telling someone that “It’s my life, and I’ll do whatever I want with it! I’m my own person! It’s my life, and I’m the one who has to live it! With a little help…”
I’m my own person! It’s my life, and I’m the one who has to live it!
Whenever a character in Peanuts is randomly yelling at someone off-panel, it can be assumed they’re talking to one of the strip’s unseen, distant adults. As noted above, every character in Peanuts is depicted as being a precocious five- to seven-year-old, a point at which the world makes very little sense, and you’re largely left to figure out your own place in it.
Lucy, like many of us, is planting her feet and announcing her personhood. It’s her life, and she’ll decide how to live it, but she’s just barely able to arrest the dive. She knows she still needs help. Maybe she doesn’t accept how much help that will actually involve, or with the appropriate grace, but Lucy’s willing to admit she might need it. It’s not a perfect lesson, but Lucy is in Peanuts to be a negative example, and this is about as close to inspirational as she ever got.