Once or twice a generation, the public becomes infatuated with displays of infantilism. From the glorious childishness of Jerry Lewis to the perpetual silliness of Jim Carrey, we are drawn to those entertainers who happily incarnate the immature, inane, and altogether puerile.
The foremost expositor of Americans’ mania for juvenilia is undoubtedly Paul Reubens. His signature creation was, of course, an age-defying lad called Pee-wee Herman, whose slicked-down hair, petite gray suit festooned with a red bow tie, and giggly manner suggested an intensely verbal, mildly naughty 10-year-old.
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Yet Reubens, who died on July 30 at 70, was far slipperier in his intentions than the likes of Lewis or Carrey. Those performers, by and large, intended their productions to be consumed by the youth market, even if their artistry, particularly Lewis’s, sometimes rendered them the inadvertent darlings of the cognoscenti. In the case of Pee-wee Herman, however, it was an openly debated question whether Reubens meant his well-dressed hellion actually to appeal to children or to the cognoscenti itself.
This ambiguity, or ruse, was undoubtedly part of the concept developed by Reubens, who, during a stretch in the 1980s that coincided with Pee-wee’s peak visibility, was booked on TV shows and sat for interviews while inhabiting the character. “Pee-wee Herman” was a contestant on The Dating Game and hosted Saturday Night Live, while the man who created him was happy to take a back seat.
In fact, Reubens’s real-life background is instructive. Born in 1952, the son of Judy and Milton Rubenfeld was a baby boomer through and through and thus the perfect person to dissect comically the flotsam and jetsam of midcentury pop culture. In a profile from 1999, Reubens told Vanity Fair that he voraciously consumed Captain Kangaroo, I Love Lucy, The Mickey Mouse Club, and, of course, Howdy Doody, on which he once appeared as an audience member. When the family pulled up stakes from Peekskill, New York, to Sarasota, Florida, he found himself living near the cast of the Ringling Bros. circus (which based its operations out of Sarasota). He remembered trick-or-treating at the home of a family of little people who were in the circus, a distinctly Pee-wee Herman-like episode from his childhood. “It was like being on acid when you were a kid,” he told Vanity Fair. “Everything was tiny. All the cabinets were down to here.”
“Being on acid when you were a kid” is a fair description of the earliest vehicles developed for Pee-wee Herman. Reubens, whose checkered educational history included stints at Boston University and the California Institute of the Arts, hatched the earliest elements of the character in 1978, when he had an association with the Groundlings comedy troupe. “I just sort of flipped a switch, and the character came out,” he explained to Vanity Fair.
What emerged was not children’s stuff at all. Any child of the 1980s who stumbled upon The Pee-wee Herman Show, a taped-for-HBO version of an extremely provocative stage show Reubens concocted early in the character’s run, will recall how different it was from the subsequent Pee-wee’s Playhouse morning show. Here, just on the edge of inappropriateness, Pee-wee’s apparent ingenuousness was challenged by an array of very adult characters, including the randy Captain Carl (Phil Hartman) and Jambi the Genie (John Paragon), making very adult jokes.
Tim Burton’s 1985 film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure represented a move toward the mainstream, but much of the movie’s originality still derived from Pee-wee existing within a world of ominous adults, including Large Marge, Mickey Morelli, and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, and pop culture references likely to be appreciated primarily by grown-ups. Even so, the film was a giddy demonstration of its maker’s delight in surreal comedy and proved successful enough to enable Reubens to properly infiltrate actual children’s programming when CBS wrangled him to create and host Pee-wee’s Playhouse, a Saturday morning classic that recreated the same unreal universe as the earlier Pee-wee productions, and made use of a number of the same players, including Hartman and Paragon, but was tailored for young viewers.
For a while, Pee-wee Herman achieved a state of ubiquity. His morning show aired from 1986 to 1990 and was the recipient of 22 Emmys, and the delightful feature film sequel Big Top Pee-wee (1988) reflected Reubens’s formative Ringling Bros. influence. He was, by far, the most recognizable celebrity to pop up for an appropriately bizarre cameo in the Frankie and Annette beach-movie spoof, Back to the Beach (he sings “Surfin’ Bird”).
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Scandal found Reubens in 1991, when he was charged with indecent exposure at an adult movie theater. Amid the media frenzy, this incident served as a potent reminder that the star had begun as an edgy comic, not a children’s performer. He was granted something of a second act thanks to off-kilter performances in films ranging from Batman Returns (as the Penguin’s pop) to Mystery Men to Blow. Yet each time Reubens had a non-Pee-wee comeback, including a multi-episode stint on Murphy Brown, it merely reminded us of how much we missed the bow tie-wearing, bicycle-loving dweeb, who finally returned in Netflix’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday in 2016.
How many of us can say why we smile at Pee-wee Herman? The source of his appeal remains something of a mystery, but time has proven it to be nothing if not lasting.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
