Pee-wee Herman told us it was okay to be weird

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This article was published 05/08/2023 (1111 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the past few days, I’ve been watching a lot of clips of Pee-wee’s Playhouse — the best-weirdest show of my childhood — following the sad news about Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, who died Sunday at the age of 70.

For children of the late 1980s/early ’90s, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which ran from 1986 to 1991, was revelatory. Spin magazine once referred to Nickelodeon’s educational show Blue’s Clues (also fronted by a charismatic host in Steve Burns) as “Nevermind for preschoolers,” referencing the groundbreaking Nirvana album. But that distinction better belongs to Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

Pee-wee Herman, with his red bowtie and too-small grey suit, was like an overgrown ventriloquist dummy, punctuating every sentence with his signature staccato “Ha! ha!” — the stuff cult icons and Halloween costumes are made of.

His was a postmodern playhouse with an anthropomorphic armchair that could hug you back. His orbit of characters ranged from garish to nightmarish: there’s Conky, the glitchy robot made from electronic odds and ends, or Penny, a girl who had, harrowingly, pennies for eyes.

Objects had the kind of names that would be bestowed by children: the chair is Chairry, the floor is Floory, the globe is Globey.

The mouse hole in the playhouse was inhabited not by teeny rodents, but by a family of dinosaurs. Even the food came to life; Pee-wee could open his freezer and find a claymation popsicle ice-skating in there, cheered on by a TV dinner.

I’d forgotten the joy of being in Pee-wee’s off-kilter world for 20-ish minutes. It wasn’t saccharine or staid like other programming meant for children; it was like Tim Burton for kids (no surprise that Burton directed 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure).

Reubens, via his Pee-wee alter ego, taught kids that it’s OK to get weird, to try things and to get loud (you had to really scream that word of the day).

“I’m just trying to illustrate that it’s OK to be different — not that it’s good, not that it’s bad, but that it’s all right,” Reubens told Rolling Stone in 1987. “I’m trying to tell kids to have a good time and to encourage them to be creative and to question things.”

That’s probably the greatest gift Reubens could have given to oddball children everywhere — along with, of course, the immortal playground retort, “I know you are but what am I?”

And then, Pee-wee became a punchline. In 1991, Reubens was arrested in Florida for indecent exposure at an adult movie theatre. The scandal was magnified, in no small part because it’s hard for the public to see children’s entertainers as full, flawed adults. It was Paul Reubens in that theatre, not Pee-wee Herman, but the two were inextricably tethered.

A second scandal followed in 2002, when Reubens was arrested on a misdemeanour charge for possessing child pornography. He pleaded not guilty, claiming the images were part of a vintage erotica collection that had been purchased in bulk. In 2004, those charges were dropped after Reubens pleaded guilty to a lesser obscenity charge.

“The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as ‘children’ and ‘sex,’ that’s really intense,” Reubens told NBC in 2004. “That’s something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something’s out there in the air that is really bad.”

The character of Pee-wee Herman was shelved for 20 years and, although Reubens continued to act in other roles (including on 30 Rock), his reputation never completely recovered. He did, however, revive the character in the late 2000s.

It’s hard not to be reminded of another high-profile death of an artist with a singular mind who was marginalized in the ’90s and pilloried by puritanical types: Sinead O’Connor, who died days before Reubens at the age of 56.

O’Connor, who was both so outspoken and so sensitive, was maligned for (and defined by) an incredible act of protest: tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992. (Of course, she was right about the sex abuse in the Catholic church.) Later, she was stigmatized for mental illness.

Both were “cancelled” for different reasons, and both continued to make art, though O’Connor never had a hit again. But reading remembrance after remembrance extolling their genius — including this one — one can’t help but wonder what their careers could have been if they’d hadn’t lost entire decades. And now, there’s no possibility for another act.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com