Reading this article about Lucy Van Pelt will cost you a nickel

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.

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