Throwback Thursday Looks at the Tongue-In-Cheek Career of Pee Wee Herman

As many of you might have heard by now, a new documentary about the perpetually impish man-child Pee Wee Herman premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. So we want to take a brief look back at his rollercoaster career and the things that endeared him to us.

I first saw Reubens as the harried bellhop/comedian in the raucous 1980 comedy Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, the follow-up to their huge cult hit Up In Smoke. As a member of LA's Groundlings Theatre, Reubans was working alongside Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong as well as a plethora of comedy fixtures who would become stars in their own right. You'll recognize renowned character actor Edie McClurg (Ferris Bueller's Day Off) in the following clip of Reubens's work in...Next Movie which also features so very un-Pee Wee-like language!

As you can see he'd already been working on the PEE WEE character for a bit at the Groundlings, and in 1981 HBO filmed one of the late-night performances for airing. The adult humor was a bit more obvious than what would later be used on his hit 1986  kids' show. In one bit he uses a hand puppet to hypnotize a woman from the audience into removing her top. In another, he and his pal use shoe mirrors to look up a girl's skirt, and later he's courted by a prisoner through the mail system.

And then there's this masturbation joke!

The gay content was pretty obvious, which is why the question of his sexuality always seemed like a moot point. The camp gay quality got especially amped up in the Pee Wee Christmas Special with guests like Grace Jones, k. d. lang, and The Del Rubio Triplets.

He worked continuously in the early eighties with small appearances in TV shows and movies, but it wasn't until 1985's Pee Wee's Big Adventure that his career, and the character was shot into the stratosphere. Directed by the still-newcomer Tim Burton, the film about "a loner, a rebel" resonated with young queers for its themes about searching for your dreams and remaining true to yourself. It was also just fucking weird, for the time.

And it had subtle queer content like this scene where he gets into drag.

As his popularity rose, so did his roles and influence. Reubens, and not Pee Wee, were allowed to branch out into non-Pee Wee projects. He made a small stir as Tucker Cobblepot, the Penguin's father, alongside Diane Salinger who played Simone in ...Big Adventure. He voiced the character of Lock in A Nightmare Before Christmas and gives us one of the best campy death scenes in 1992's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

His career, with all of its ups and downs, kept him in working up until the end, with some notable lows like Big Top Pee Wee and stellar highs, like his memorable portrayal of Gerhart in an episode of 30 Rock.

Pee-wee as Himself explores not only the character but also the actor Paul Reubens who created and played Pee Wee through its celebrated and award-winning Saturday morning show, several movies, TV appearances, and on Broadway. One of the more talked-about and frustrating parts of the documentary is the fact that it is only now, posthumously, that Reubens discusses his often-questioned sexuality and his personal life. It's a definitive answer to a question we long already "knew" the answer to. Yes, Reubens was gay. Frustrating because for whatever personal reasons, his internalized homophobia, pressure on a public figure, or other factors, Reubens, even in this day and age, felt the need to remain in the closet. Reubens, who died in 2023 of cancer at the age of 70, an illness he also concealed from the public, says in the doc "I was out of the closet, and then I went back in the closet,” Reubens says in the documentary. “I wasn’t pursuing the Paul Reubens career; I was pursuing the Pee-wee Herman career.”

But enough of all that seriousness. Here's the full HBO live special from 1981 in its entirety! Enjoy!

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