Charlie Brown knows he’s doomed. He absolutely, irrefutably knows it. But a little part of his mind always thinks, “Maybe not this time, though.” That glimmer of hope is his Achilles’ heel. It’s also the quality that makes him so eminently relatable. The joke is not that Charlie Brown is hopeless. The joke is that Charlie Brown knows he’s hopeless, but he doesn’t trust the infallibility of his own insecurity.