Pee-wee Herman and Ronald Reagan’s presidency emerged at roughly the same time, and both seemed to intuit the long, deep, inescapable stretch of nostalgia that would define America’s cultural future. For Reagan, whose heavy makeup also tended to blushing cheeks and boyish insouciance, it was all about returning to core values while cutting taxes and government spending — fill-’er-up service with a gee-whiz smile.
Pee-wee similarly leaped out of bed in his jammies to greet the sunshine of Morning in America (bicycles whizzing past, mailmen and cowboys waving to pretty ladies in bouffant splendor), but those of us who looked close enough saw the intentional, darker subtext in Pee-wee’s make-believe world. It was a deranged yet delightfully effective twist on Peter Pan.
What’s the harm, really, in trying to overlay some theories on Pee-wee’s ultimately endearing arc, upon hearing the news Monday that actor Paul Reubens — who gamely played Pee-wee for four-plus decades, bringing himself and the character back from the ruins of scandal — had died Sunday night at age 70, from a bout with cancer that he would keep private until the end.
Reubens proved many times over that he could play just about any comedic role, but Pee-wee was his lifelong creation, and a dear friend to fans who understood the character as both optimist and cynic. As Pee-wee, Reubens celebrated regression as an antidote to depression; he lived deliberately in a world no one might have imagined, a modern phenomenon who is nevertheless locked in a past that no one could retrieve.
He treated nostalgia, with its boomer-era toys and accoutrements and playground insults (“I know you are, but what am I?”) as a delightful yet cockamamie realm, doing the Hula-Hoop while seeming to anticipate Armageddon’s mushroom cloud in the near distance. Setting aside Prince and Madonna (and Reagan), it’s possible Pee-wee Herman was the most 1980s thing about the 1980s.
And, in the beginning, he belonged entirely to the outsiders. Reubens’s first take on Pee-wee on the improv stage was riskier, intended entirely for grown-ups who were just old enough to second-guess their own childhoods. It led to a 1981 HBO special that aired late at night, which led to frequent appearances on David Letterman’s still-nascent “Late Night” talk show on NBC. Early Letterman and early Pee-wee were custom-made for each other: As Pee-wee, bursting with energy and awkwardness, Reubens would bring out a grab bag of toys and double-entendres; Letterman would laugh and squirm, pretending that yet another lunatic had found his way to “Late Night’s” studio. The teenagers of Generation X took to Pee-wee immediately, imitating him in a knowing way. “Stop it! Stop it right now,” I can still hear my Spanish teacher snapping, after some cutup, not me, kept doing the Pee-wee Herman laugh — heh, heh — behind her back. (“En español, por favor,” came the reply, in Pee-wee’s voice.)
On the big screen, in 1985’s brilliantly conceived “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” the blooming, gothic talents of director Tim Burton (with a vibrantly erratic soundtrack from Danny Elfman) melded with the fullest possible Pee-wee worldview, as our hero leaves his toy-tastic cottage and small-town cocoon on a cross-country quest to find his stolen bicycle.
After rejecting a love interest (“I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel,” Pee-wee says, as if a guy with talking furniture could ever fully claim to be a loner) and getting frustrated with his neighbors’ lack of concern for his lost bike (“Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?”), Pee-wee is confronted with compounding adult realities: hitchhiking with a fugitive, winning the hearts of a mean biker gang, discovering there is indeed “no basement at the Alamo.” On the face of it, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” was merely a series of sight gags. Deeper down, it’s about Pee-wee making a long trip around to restoring his own innocence.
There were a lot of ways to both fall in love with Reubens’s character and to also find him annoying, but there was no denying that he, along with other retro acts (the B-52’s come to mind) had harnessed a longing for and a lampooning of a B-movie, mid-century vibe: In the high time of Pee-wee Herman, every fun city had at least one gift store that sold inflatable Godzillas and cat’s-eye sunglasses and chile-pepper Christmas lights along with sardonic, non-Hallmark greeting cards.
After the film’s success, CBS gambled on a notion that Pee-wee’s greatest appeal could be found with actual children, giving him his own Saturday-morning TV show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” premiering in 1986. It was instead ardently watched by hung-over college students, but it also welcomed in just the right sort of kids, who liked any chance to be let in on the real joke that exists just beneath the gag — to be treated as if they’re smart. These days we’d call the Playhouse a safe space.
“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” ran for five seasons, including a dazzlingly campy 1988 Christmas special that brought on such guests as Cher, Grace Jones, Little Richard and Charo, both subverting and honoring the holiday variety-show genre. You look at it now and rest assured in the certainty that Reubens knew exactly what he was doing, and exactly who his audience was. “Playhouse” may have come across to a casual viewer like a cosmic mash-up of “Captain Kangaroo” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” filled with beloved creatures (a chair named Chairry; a globe named Globey), but any attempt at education and moral through-line was merely part of a grander shtick, delivered with a perfect dollop of sarcasm. If “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” existed to teach kids anything, it was about the value and wonder of absurdism. Without its influence, it’s hard to imagine there could have ever been a “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
In the summer of 1991, not long after the CBS show ended, Reubens was, as far too many people will forever remember, arrested and charged with indecent exposure in a Sarasota, Fla., movie theater that showed pornographic films.
This is a difficult event to describe to anyone who lives in the present-day America of Pornhub and OnlyFans, but the public reaction was swift and cruel, filled with that unbearable degree of outrage and indignation from the sort of people who never enjoyed or understood Pee-wee Herman in the first place, and regarded him merely as a children’s performer caught doing a dirty thing. After a long exile, Reubens revived his acting career, and eventually Pee-wee returned, too, bringing a new “Playhouse” show to Broadway. The movie theater incident faded into proper relief, where it always belonged.
Except, of course, where Florida is involved. Now, in a culture derailed by childish taunts and vicious politics (“I know you are, but what am I — infinity”), fixated on all the wrong kinds of nostalgia, where drag queens and other groovy outliers are publicly pilloried and accused of trying to corrupt children, it is becoming quite clear that things are increasingly less safe for anyone who deigns to be different. Just when the world could use Pee-wee’s keen and welcoming sense of humor, we lost him.
