Pee-wee Herman Was the Greatest Pop-Culture Manchild Ever
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It was the laugh that got you first: A staccato giggle combined with what sounded like a T. rex’s roar. If you watch The Pee-wee Herman Show, the HBO special taken from Paul Reubens’ 1981 stage show that — along with a handful of appearances on Late Night with David Letterman — introduced this hyperactive goofball to a larger audience, you actually hear that arrrgghhhh–heh-heh-heh-heh-heh before you see him. And then, when Herman pokes his head through a window and bursts through a jagged front door (if the set looks like a trial run for his Saturday-morning playhouse, it’s because L.A. underground artist Gary Panter was the production designer on both), you clock his fashion sense: White shoes. Red bow tie. Light gray suit two sizes too tight. Crew-cut that carbon-dates back to 1955.
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When he starts hyperventilating his way through a theme song to the audience of Angeleno hipsters at the Roxy Theatre (“Onyourmark getready getset/Now go-go-go-go-GO!”), you wonder if you’ve stumbled upon some sort of demented kids’ show from the distant Eisenhower-era past.
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The actual kids’ show would come later. This was just a fantasy world of kitsch and camp, dreamed up by a guy who came up with a character during an improv exercise and, with a little bit of tweaking, turned him into a pop cultural icon.
Reubens’ death on Sunday at age 70 from cancer, a disease he’d been battling in private for the past six years, was announced via social media. And though he was a prolific character actor who’d been working since the early 1970s and had small roles in everything from The Blues Brothers to 30 Rock, it’s Pee-wee Herman who you pictured whenever you thought of Reubens. What may have started as a funhouse-mirror hipster reflection of the Reagan years’ infatuation with a more “innocent” American yesteryear turned into something so gloriously weird and warped that it took on a life of its own. Herman became the greatest manchild ever known, an instantly recognizable movie and TV star with an oversized personality, a gloriously obnoxious voice and an endless reservoir of corny playground comebacks (“I know you are, but what am I?”). The fact that he ended up eclipsing the comedian who created him in the first place was something Reubens embraced in the biggest way possible: I know I’m Pee-wee, but who are you?!
Reubens claimed he came up with the whining falsetto voice of Pee-wee when he was in a theatrical production of Life with Father early in his career; he just made it more cartoonish. The original version of Herman that he workshopped after moving to California and joined the improv group the Groundlings was that he was a horrible stand-up comic. Later, fellow Groundling Phil Hartman worked with Reubens on turning the character into somebody who had the sense of humor of a 10-year-old and was high on a perpetual sugar rush. When he auditioned for Saturday Night Live in 1980 and didn’t make the cut, Reubens decided to do the Pee-wee stage show. It became a cult sensation, then a staple of HBO’s comedy-special re-runs. Reubens started appearing on talk shows like Letterman’s as the guy in the tight gray suit. Nobody knew who Paul was. Almost everyone knew Pee-wee.
Then came Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, and well… you could now take the “almost” out of that sentence. Enlisting the help of a former Disney animator named Tim Burton, Reubens gave Pee-wee an epic big-screen debut featuring a missing bike, ghost truckers, fugitive ex-cons, angry bikers, the Alamo and James Brolin as the superspy “Mr. Herman…Mr. P.W. Herman.” You would never hear the Champs’ “Tequila” the same way again.
It was a huge success, which led to a sequel (Big Top Pee-wee) and more importantly, a perch on Saturday morning TV. Imagine that “Breakfast Machine” opening from Big Adventure, but reimagined as a weekly half-hour kids’ show — an actual kids’ show, not just a parody of one with a knowing wink and double-entendres. That was Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which created a whole world built around Pee-wee, populated by friendly neighbors, wisecracking pterodactyls, beatnik puppets and talking furniture. It ran for five seasons, and was appointment viewing for six-year-olds, 16-year-old stoners and 26-year-old slackers alike.
But Playhouse also played perfectly to the character’s sensibility, which involved a sort of beautifully realized Peter Pan syndrome minus the toxic aspects. What kid wouldn’t want to live in a house like that, when every day was fun day and you could hang with a genie? Pee-wee didn’t hate the adult world so much as ignore the responsibilities of it, and his child-like engagement with things helped present him as both a tour guide to this singular Hermaniverse and a co-conspirator with his younger viewers. “One of the things I feel that the show did really well was that we never talked down to kids,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014, when Playhouse was remastered and released on Blu-ray. “It was a show that assumed its viewers were very young but very smart. It never seemed like a kid’s show if you actually were a kid.”
The show ended shortly before Reubens endured a humiliating scandal — you know the one — though the combo of the cancellation and the controversy didn’t kill off Pee-wee permanently. He brought back Herman to reintroduce the 1991 MTV Music Awards, and was greeted with wild applause and chants of “Pee-wee! Pee-wee!” (His opening line: “Heard any good jokes lately?”) Though he’d continue to work — see: Mystery Men, a 1999 comedy about a second-rate superhero team that predates the MCU big bang by almost a decade — Reubens always knew that his legacy rested with the character who defined his career. Generations kept discovering both Big Adventure and the Playhouse series, and responded to his ability to make it all right for folks to let their geek flag fly. Reubens brought back the stage show, this time to Broadway, in 2010. Talk of another Pee-wee movie over several decades finally came to fruition when Pee-wee’s Big Holiday was released on Netflix in 2016.
In later years, people started recognizing him even when he was out of costume, and Paul Reubens had finally gone from the guy hidden behind Pee-wee Herman to the guy behind Pee-wee Herman. As the tributes now pore in, you can see people highlighting his other work, notably his turn as Gerhardt Messerschmit Rammstein Von Hap, royal of Austria, on 30 Rock. But the impact of his childlike ringmaster of secret words and wacky worlds — a force of family-friendly anarchy that proved to kids you could grow up to be your own adult — is what’s causing such an outpouring of both grief and gratitude.
When I first heard that Reubens had died, I threw on a random episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It happened to be “Ants in Your Pants,” the eighth episode of the first season. The secret word of the day is “What” (there’s a lot of screaming). Miss Yvonne proposes they spend the day playing House, which Pee-wee says is a “girl’s game.” The puppets convince him to do it. Yvonne is the mom. Pee-wee is the dad, who brings his “kids,” Terry and Globey, a moonrock from a space trip. Reba, the local mailwoman, says she’s the grandmother “who’s on her way to Miami.” Thanks to some special shoes, Pee-wee walks on the ceiling. Randy the Juvenile Delinquent Puppet tries to get Pee-wee to smoke a cigarette. The King of Cartoons drops by. Three kids — including a seven-year-old Natasha Lyonne — play musical chairs. The ants get loose, get in people’s pants and cause a lot of crazy dancing.
I’ve seen this episode more than a few times, and yet the unpredictability, the sheer anything-goes fun, the oddball mix of old-school animation and animatronic chairs and globes reeling around, the anti-smoking PSA that didn’t feel like a PSA, and the sense that you were watching people have fun doing all of this felt totally fresh. That’s what Reubens loved about playing Pee-wee: It gave him license to be a 10-year-old again. And even if you were in on the “joke” or simply dug the kooky irony on display, it gave you, the viewer, the chance to remember what it was like to be 10 as well. Other performers will pick up that mantle, but very few could do it as well, as consistently, as subversively or as hilariously as this overgrown preadolescent. R.I.P., Pee-wee. R.I.P., Paul Reubens.
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