Critic’s Appreciation: Paul Reubens and Pee-wee Herman Left a Timeless and Ageless Mark on the Culture

Daniel Fienberg
·5 min read
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I know you are, but what am I!

I know you are, but what am I?

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Childlike rejoinder or existential inquiry?

In the case of Paul Reubens and Pee-wee Herman, his most indelible creation, the answer is an unambiguous, “Yes.”

Inclusive disjunctions of this sort are almost unavoidable when it comes to Reubens and Pee-wee.

Was Pee-wee Herman an overgrown, well-dressed child or a childish, enthusiastically regressive man?

Yes.

Was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure a comedy for adults or an absurdist fairy tale for children?

Yes.

Was Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the astonishingly avant-garde series built around the character and his outlandish and occasionally inanimate friends, a Saturday morning variety platform directed at kids or a satire on Saturday morning variety platforms directed at grownups?

Yes.

Reubens and Pee-wee Herman resolutely defied taxonomy. For over 40 years, viewers attempting to get a conclusive read on the character have found him to be a phenomenon that shifts based on your point of approach.

It’s no wonder that one of the clips being passed around social media most insistently in the aftermath of Reubens’ death this week at age 70 is from 1983 and features Pee-wee Herman interacting with Andy Warhol, an intersection of personalities that probably wouldn’t have made an iota of sense to eight-year-old me.

That same kid found Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to be one of the most hilariously immature movies ever made, one of the scariest movies ever made — the specter of Large Marge still haunts me, as I’m sure it still haunts Pee-wee — and a tableau of bizarre and somewhat inaccessible moments that I was completely sure would make sense to me only when I was a grown-up.

Rewatching the movie — very plausibly the best thing Tim Burton has ever been involved with — a few years ago, suddenly all of the strange references and overtly winking gags made sense, while so many of Pee-wee’s juvenile antics and the chaos they generated had become nearly inaccessible.

For decades of watching and rewatching, I’ve never known for sure if Pee-wee was too smart for me or too dumb, if I was too young to be watching him or too old. The truth is that here again the answer has always been “Yes.” Reubens understood that younger viewers are always seeking out things they deem to be “for adults,” while older viewers are always seeking out things that transport them back to childhood. The nature of Schrödinger’s Pee-wee is that he’s always both.

The great genius of Pee-wee Herman and the performer who created him is that if you watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a child, you found it to be a child’s show, complete with valuable lessons and motivational uplift; if you watched it as a twentysomething stoner, you found it unfathomable that every single person and puppet involved couldn’t have been high for every second of its production; if you watched it as a mature grown-up, you found it to be a calculating work of self-aware commentary on the genre, but maybe of childhood in general.

As a brand, was Pee-wee Herman impossibly wholesome or astonishingly subversive? As a character, was he a good little boy or an unrelenting and monstrous evocation of id? Were his various entertainment properties exercises in camp or earnest to an almost head-scratching extreme? When Pee-wee tells a joke that a Borscht Belt comic or a 1950s late-night host would have found too hoary, are we laughing because we understand and recognize the built-in fatigue of the joke structures and punchlines or because Pee-wee’s eagerness is so lacking in guile?

“Yes,” on all counts.

The truth is that Pee-wee Herman was probably too indelible, too inextricably linked to his creator, so much so that we lost track of what a spectacular and fearless performer Reubens was. There was a complacent willingness to accept any Reubens performance as, “Just Paul Reubens being weird again” — as if The Spleen in Mystery Men or Papa Cobblepot in Batman Returns or Amilyn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Oscar in Pushing Daisies were the same thing, as opposed to deliriously unique creations from a singularly committed performing voice.

If you’d asked me this morning, I’d have guessed that Reubens won an Emmy for his entirely unhinged turn as an inbred Hapsburg prince on 30 Rock. It turns out he wasn’t even nominated, which I can only attribute to an industry taking Reubens and his various outlandish identities for granted. Whatever the cause, it’s inexcusable.

Reubens and Pee-wee Herman didn’t influence every comic and performer in the multiple generations that followed. But their influence nonetheless ranges from obvious to baked-into-the-cultural-DNA on a primordial level.

Without Pee-wee Herman, we probably don’t get Tom Hanks in Big or Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine in Hulu’s PEN15. We don’t get half the characters conceived by Will Ferrell or Chris Kattan or Nasim Pedrad or too many Saturday Night Live performers to count, an irony given that Reubens famously auditioned for and was rejected by the Lorne Michaels sketch show.

You don’t get iconoclastic genre deconstructors like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or Nathan Fielder or Eric Andre without Reubens. Nor do you get Bo Burnham and his fits of wink-and-nudge absurdism. Does the Danny McBride man-child archetype exist without Reubens and Pee-wee? How about Amy Sedaris and Maria Bamford and their unselfconscious and uncomfortable personae? I doubt it.

But it isn’t necessarily that obvious. John Mulaney and his whole eternally youthful, endlessly upbeat, admirably dapper shtick? My gut tells me that’s Reubens-esque as well, though I’m not sure I could explain why. For that matter, would we even get the $4,000 Thom Browne shrunken gray suit without Pee-wee’s fearless sense of style?

See why Andy Warhol and Pee-wee Herman were a thoroughly logical pairing? Pee-wee was both the thing itself and the commentary on the thing itself, wrapped up with a bow-tie.

We knew he was, but what was he?

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