It's not the football, it's the game, Charlie Brown.

Many years ago I started a series called Rewriting the Cartoons. The idea was to re-caption already published cartoons by other artists, usually to make a very different, often politically critical point.

I have turned this technique on the Peanuts strip a few times.

I grew up on Peanuts and would to this day call it my all time favourite cartoon. Charles Schulz was brilliant at capturing human interactions, blemishes and all.

Below are three different re-writes, followed by the original:

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This is about Canadian politics and would have been prior to an election. I don’t recall which one. I didn’t date these. The issues are a bit different today of course. It is increasingly difficult to tell the parties apart. Parties are reluctant to stand up for anything in particular and spend their time and money being against the other guy and throwing insults.

And here is the original, or one version of it. Over the years, Schulz used many different punchlines, as you can see in this history of the Lucy and the Football gag, which appeared in Slate in 2014.