The Moment That Saved Paul Reubens’ Career: “Heard Any Good Jokes Lately?”
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By the fall of 1991, it looked like the end of Paul Reubens and his beloved persona, Pee-wee Herman. After his highly publicized arrest that July on charges of indecent exposure at an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Florida, Reubens had become a national laughingstock, and the actor had retreated entirely from the public view.
CBS immediately pulled syndicated episodes of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and refused to air the final four episodes of the series, for which production had ended the previous year. Toys-R-Us removed all Pee-wee toys from their shelves. Reubens would eventually plead no contest to the charges, but in the court of public opinion, many believed his career was over.
Instead, Reubens—who died of cancer on Sunday, at age 70—pulled off one of the most unlikely and unexpected comebacks in show business history. And he did it with five words: “Heard any good jokes lately?” he asked a cheering crowd after walking onstage during the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards.
The self-deprecating one-liner drew a standing ovation from the crowd, received glowing media reviews, and helped salvage Reubens’ post–Pee-wee career. But the memorable moment came only after weeks of discussions and deliberations, as well as Reubens’ own doubts about whether to take the stage at all and what to say once he got there.
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MTV’s Pitch
In the weeks leading up to the VMAs ceremony on September 5, 1991, MTV executives had considered several possible ideas to kick off the show, according to Doug Herzog, the network’s senior vice president of music programming. “It was part of regular MTV brainstorming,” Herzog said. “We were sitting around thinking of what interesting things we could do with the show, and we just came up with the idea of Pee-wee opening the show.”
MTV contacted Bender, Goldman & Helper, the Los Angeles–based publicity firm Reubens hired to manage media relations following his arrest. The firm had already been giving thought to how, if at all, Reubens might make his public comeback, and they quickly agreed the VMAs were an excellent opportunity, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
“[Reubens] was concerned about what he will say and what he will do when it comes time to say something to the public,” agency partner Larry Goldman said. “He felt this was the first step in that direction, to make contact with the public again—to get that part of the comeback out of the way. We felt fans should see him and know he’s doing OK.”
But Reubens wasn’t so sure at first, according to Entertainment Weekly. He wasn’t convinced it was the right time or place to speak. It took a great deal of convincing by MTV to persuade him, and Reubens insisted it had to be a surprise, according to Salli Frattini, the show’s executive producer.
“We kept after him,” Herzog said. “We were going back and forth for a while. He needed to get comfortable with the idea. When he got comfortable with it, he agreed.”
A Nervous Pee-wee
Goldman said Reubens’ long-standing relationship with MTV, and his high regard for the network, was another factor in his decision to participate.
“After the incident, they showed their support, which he appreciated,” Goldman said. “When we started thinking about what we could do to let his fans know he’s fine and doing well and he’s on his way back, appearing on the MTV awards was a natural. That audience is his audience, and he’s comfortable with them.”
Still, Reubens was extremely nervous the day of the show. He was snuck into a private holding area below the stage through a back door, because “if people knew about it, he wasn’t going to show up,” Frattini said. Only a small handful of crew members even knew he was there, she said, and one of them saw him pray before taking the stage, according to the Sentinel.
Reubens’ appearance wasn’t rehearsed, and it was Reubens and his people who wrote his lines, not MTV. “We had given him a few ideas of what to say, but those were really his words,” Frattini said. As the show began, Reubens took to the stage wearing his full Pee-wee Herman attire for the first time in more than a year.
The crowd cheered wildly; it proved to be the only spontaneous ovation of the whole show, according to the Los Angeles Times. After thanking the crowd several times, Reubens delivered the now-famous “Heard any good jokes lately?” line, followed by his famous Pee-wee punchline “So funny I forgot to laugh,” before introducing the rest of the show.
The Comeback Begins
After the show, Reubens was “elated” by the enthusiastic crowd response, according to the Sentinel. Critics were equally effusive. MTV called it “one of VMA history’s biggest moments,” and Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Proving he had the gumption to poke fun at himself… Pee-wee had escaped from the stigma of being a punchline.”
“Herman’s was the perfect comeback, emotional even in its extreme brevity by the trace of nervousness actor Paul Reubens belied in resurrecting his childlike character,” Chris Willman of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a review of the show. “It was a touching and funny TV moment.”
The moment kicked off a modest comeback for Reubens, whose career had been on life support just days earlier. He went on to appear in a variety of films throughout the 1990s, including in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Batman Returns (1992), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Duston Checks In (1996), Matilda (1996), and Mystery Men (1999).
Reubens earned an Emmy nomination in 1995 for his string of guest appearances on the television series Murphy Brown. He also earned rave reviews for his supporting turn as a hairdresser turned drug dealer in Blow (2001), starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz. He even brought Pee-wee Herman out of retirement, starring on Broadway in The Pee-wee Herman Show in 2010, and the Netflix original movie Pee-wee’s Big Holiday in 2016.
And it was all made possible by that one memorable moment on the Universal Amphitheatre stage in Los Angeles in 1991. As The Atlantic wrote, it was “the first step towards his career revival.”
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