A Tribute To Pee-Wee Herman, The Manifestation of Our Remembered Adolescent Joy

When I learned Paul Reubens had died, I started a rewatch of his Pee-Wee’s Playhouse that ran for five seasons (1986-1990) on CBS’ Saturday Mornings. In the third episode, “Rainy Day,” Pee-Wee folds a paper airplane and so I did, too, my first one since my own kids were very small, a decade or more ago. My fingers remembered how to do it. The rasp of skin against it, making sure the creases were sharp. I launched it across the room and felt a lightness in my chest that comes with the simple joy of making something that flies from the junk weighing down my desk. The junk weighing me down, contributing to this constant feeling of drowning beneath the responsibilities of being grown. The secret word today is: joy. 

Paul Reubens’ specific gift was in animating the mundane detritus of our life with purpose and warmth, humor, empathy, invention. Anything could be beautiful. It could evolve into something else if only there were someone invested enough in its growth. For a generation of kids, Reubens’ alter ego Pee-Wee Herman offered fellowship for the outcasts and the misfits; he invested in our growth, he believed in us. To him, you were the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, you were a cowboy, a King of Cartoons. He was the enemy of conventional notions of what was normal and polite. He was an empathetic Mr. Bean in that way, a chaos agent working for us to disrupt rigid social mores and class structures. His clown persona is that of a great disruptor and he made it clear that his transgressions could be ours, too.

For a generation of kids, Paul Reubens’ alter ego Pee-Wee Herman offered fellowship for the outcasts and the misfits; he invested in our growth, he believed in us. To him, you were the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, you were a cowboy, a King of Cartoons.

The show was an offshoot of the success of the film he did with Tim Burton, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) that followed Pee-Wee’s struggles to reclaim a special bike stolen from him by loathsome child of privilege Francis (Mark Holton). It’s one of those films — like Young Frankenstein (1974), Blazing Saddles (1974), Airplane! (1980) and Raising Arizona (1987) — that’s quotable for its entire runtime. The scene I think of the most is a burning pet shop sequence in which our hero happens upon a tragedy and runs into the flames to save the animals, making multiple trips, but leaving the snakes for last because of his fear and revulsion of them. But he does save them. 

It proved to be the big break for both Burton and Reubens. Tim eventually got Batman and Reubens got his show. Burton thanked Reubens upon his death for giving him his career. When Reubens lost his show due to an embarrassing personal episode, his first job on the road back was as one of The Penguin’s parents in Burton’s Batman Returns (1992). I remember the shock of recognition when I saw him: playing against type as an upper-class muckety-muck who, disgusted by his deformed offspring, launches the baby to its fate in the dank and filth of the Gotham sewers. It’s so effective because it is the antithesis of what Reubens represented to us to this point: the love of difference and the desire to bridge every social chasm with irrepressible, and infectious, irreverence. 

Reubens created Pee-Wee after he failed an audition for the 1980 season of Saturday Night Live. He was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe “The Groundlings” and imagined a stand-up comedian named after a brand of harmonica he liked as a kid who was so terrible, and so unflappable, that he couldn’t help but succeed. Even Pee-Wee’s birth was an act of defiance against popular taste. He enlisted friends and fellow-Groundlings Phil Hartman and Lynne Stewart to do a running late-night “Pee-Wee Herman Show” at the venue that quickly attracted sold-out crowds and then a waiting list. HBO captured it in a one-off special in 1981 that shows all the seeds for his eventual “Playhouse.” My favorite episode of the show is the second of its last season, “Mystery.” In it, Pee-Wee notices a few personal items going missing. His investigations lead him to the discovery of a new neighbor, Busby (played by the late and beloved Leslie Jordan), who is trying to impersonate Pee-Wee in order to be more popular. Pee-Wee, with an assist from Ms. Yvonne (Stewart) helps him to understand that the best way to be loved is to be himself. 

The show, by this point, had started to show some age. It’s less carefree, stranger, and colored with a patina of self-reflexivity that pointed, I think, to the beginning of the end. The only thing that could really kill Pee-Wee Herman is if Pee-Wee Herman ever became self-conscious; I wonder if Reubens was starting to have those feelings after 10 years of playing this character? I love “Mystery,” though, because it made Pee-Wee’s amplified prickliness part of the story: his interrogation of his friends, his frustration, and the dark punchline at the end where he tells Busby he can keep the suit he’s stolen from Pee-Wee… until he cleans it. The push-pull between Reubens wanting to take off the suit and bowtie and his protectiveness of it is irresolvable. He knew that no matter what he did for the rest of his career, this character would be the one that defined him. (Pee-Wee got the handprints on the Walk of Fame, not Paul.)

He wouldn’t embrace Pee-Wee again until more than a decade later when he began hinting at a Playhouse movie, a live stage production (that came to fruition in 2010), and a third film, after Big Adventure and Big Top Pee-Wee (1988) that eventually became Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Pee-Wee was the manifestation of our remembered adolescent joy: mischief for its own sake, the kind of antic energy that earned sighs from exhausted adults, the longing to fly in cardboard box spaceships and to have a bike that was really a Swiss Army gadget the envy of all your friends. He is the exemplar of letting ones freak flag fly. There’s extraordinary power in him.

Reubens had even more in him. He steals the show in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) film as vampire Amilyn, who takes a stake to the heart and then a minute to die; of the uniformly excellent Mystery Men (1999), too, as hero Spleen who has an unfortunate superpower. I had a minute of real exaltation when he showed up as Oswald Cobblepot’s (the Penguin of course) biological father in three episodes of the Gotham series, essentially reprising his role from Batman Returns, but correcting that portrayal into one of a real, if misplaced, warmth. But for as important as his Pee-Wee Herman was to me growing up, the role I’ll hold next to my heart as I grow old is his little-seen turn as JC Schiffer in Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic, confidante to Sharon Stone’s children author Olivia Lake who, slightly tipsy, delivers a toast in its second episode that brought a tear to my eye for its kindness and irony in light of the terrible events to follow. 

JC taps his glass and confesses he’s had too much to drink, but wants to toast his friend who has an unerring ability to sense when a relationship is about to end, grows “wings like a bat” the better to effect her escape, and zooms out of danger. He says of her new relationship that it’s the first time this far into a love affair that he hasn’t detected the sprouting of wings. There are a lot of ways the speech could go wrong. It could be too foreboding, demonstrating a foreknowledge that might implicate JC for not acting on behalf of his friend. It could be sappy and unconvincing or bitter and sarcastic, laden with jealousy or spite. What it is, though, is what Reuben’s hallmark turned out to be: warm and effortlessly sincere. The emotional impact of what unfolds hinges on this moment and it says a lot for Reubens to have been trusted with it. His JC contains multitudes and Reubens is the equal to every manifold facet. He was an original and, as such, irreplaceable. His brand was joy, and he’s already missed.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.