Pee-wee Herman Was a Loner, a Rebel
Jaye P. Morgan gave Paul Reubens a “10” before the rest of America did.
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The man who became Pee-wee Herman previewed his famous “Tequilla” dance on The Gong Show in the 1970s as part of a “Suave and Debonair” double-act with John Paragon, who later played Jambi on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Chuck Barris, unsurprisingly an early supporter of the sui generis Reubens, allowed him on The Gong Show more than a dozen times despite rules prohibiting repeat contestants. A proto-version of Pee-wee Herman appeared in Barris’s other big production, The Dating Game. Like Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, Reubens remains a phenomenon better experienced than explained.
Reubens, the performer better known by the Pee-wee Herman character he created, died of cancer on Sunday. As Norm Macdonald, who also battled the disease privately, might say, “I didn’t even know he was sick.”
Everyone at least knew he was weird. He picked his nose and preserved his finds as a child. His mania for collecting extended as an adult to massive amounts of pornography, which became “vintage erotica” in his side’s telling when the police took almost as much of an interest in the visual assemblage as he did. One suspects the weirdness that perhaps alienated him from others in his social life explains what attracted so many to him on the stage.
The silver screen acted as his biggest stage of all when, to massive promotion on MTV, he appeared in one of the greatest American road movies, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Like so much good art, it strikes viewers as layered. One can watch it years later and notice parts, more subtle than Large Marge’s eyes popping out, overlooked in 1985. Everyone recalls Jan Hooks explaining that the Alamo has no basement and the guide leading the tourists in ridiculing poor Pee-wee. But on a second or third view, one glimpses, for a second, a child step out from the crowd to snap a picture of the mocked Pee-wee, as if to capture an image of this dweeb for later enjoyment during social occasions. It at once put an exclamation point on the scene and yet did so in an understated, non-exclamation point kind of way. Pee-wee Herman was smart in his silliness.
Like Cyndi Lauper (who sang his TV show theme song) and Mr. T (whom he often invoked), Reubens enjoyed a phenomenal 1980s. Then the clock struck 12 on his ball. The end occurred in an X-rated theater in Sarasota, Florida, in 1991. His career gravitated from the edgy HBO material for adults to the ultimate 8-to-88 movie to the kid-friendly Pee-wee’s Playhouse television show. That gradual shift to a younger audience made the arrest so devastating to his career. The Rube Goldberg machines suddenly stopped. (READ MORE: Oppenheimer: An Ode to American Ambition)
Reubens so becoming his character — something far beyond typecast — in the public eye, on its own, probably doomed him in the wake of the scandal. Playing a permanent child doomed him. His audience morphing from late-night pay cable to Saturday mornings on CBS doubly doomed him.
He became the butt of jokes rather than the teller of them. Disturbed kids like him and raised in part by him asked, “What did Jeffrey Dahmer say to Pee-wee Herman?” followed by the punchline and then laughter. Reubens showed himself a good sport in a memorable appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards by asking the crowd, “Heard any good jokes lately?” But the Pee-wee Herman character never quite recovered, even if Reubens enjoyed a memorable role in the 2001 film Blow.
The public failed to separate the art from the artist. This sin finds mitigation in Reubens, so succeeding in blurring the boundary between actor and role. (READ MORE: Joke Man: A ‘Charming’ Portrayal of Jackie Martling)
No one wants to see a 70-year-old Peter Pan. This holds true even for a child star who achieved stardom as a 30-something boy. Although he revived the character in 2016 for Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, Reubens appearing as himself, and yet still tremendously entertaining, on late-night talk shows in his final decades suggests he understood more than most that the finite nature of childhood made it special. No one gets to ride on the merry-go-round forever.
Paul Reubens died earlier this week. Pee-wee Herman predeceased him by several decades.
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