Charles "Charlie" Brown is the main character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.

Character

Charlie Brown is a loveable loser, a child possessed of endless determination and hope, but who is ultimately dominated by his insecurities and a "permanent case of bad luck", and often taken advantage of by his peers. He is sometimes a scapegoat for bad situations he is only tangentially involved in. These traits are best seen in the history of his baseball team, where Charlie Brown is the manager of the team and its pitcher. Charlie Brown is constantly cursed as a pitcher, often giving up tremendous hits which blast him off the mound. Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy is one of the few particularly competent players; the team itself is poor and tends to win only by small but important technicalities, often because of Charlie's non-involvement. Circumstances invariably arise to lessen his rare victories (a misspelled bowling trophy, a prize credit for free haircuts despite his father being a barber), though he is usually optimistic due to their sheer rarity. In It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown a running gag is Charlie putting too many holes in his ghost sheet and only getting rocks-although in a early newspaper comic version its Linus who has too many holes in his Halloween costume!

Charlie Brown is also an enthusiastic kite-flyer, but a running joke is that his kites keep landing in a "Kite-Eating Tree" or suffering even worse fates. Once in 1958, he finally got the kite to fly before it spontaneously combusted in the air. However in the July 13, 1961 strip Charlie Brown not only gets his kite to fly, but to fly so high that he has to ask Lucy to tie on some extra string. The punch line is that Lucy does this in a huge bow-followed by various odds and ends-including a heavy chain which brings the kite down. The kite is airborne through the four panels of the strip. A Sunday episode showed that once Charlie Brown tried to fly his kite in winter - and it froze solid in the air.

Lucy tends to outright belittle Charlie Brown, often calling him and Linus "blockheads", best by the 'football gag'; every autumn Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick, and every year she pulls it away as he follows through, causing him to fly in the air and land painfully on his back. He was never shown as succeeding in kicking the football in the comic strip, although animated features have played with the concept.

Charlie Brown is drawn with only a small curl of hair at the front of his head, and a little in the back. Though this is often interpreted as him being bald, Charles Schulz explained that he saw Charlie Brown as having hair that was so light, and cut so short, that it was not seen very well. Charlie Brown has often mentioned getting a haircut, or his hair in general, throughout the strip's run. Snoopy thinks of his owner as "that round-headed kid". He almost always wears black shorts and his trademark short-sleeved shirt, usually yellow, with a black zig-zag stripe around the middle.