R.I.P-wee, Paul Reubens

 

We've been fans of Pee-wee Herman since the onset of his unlikely fame in the early '80s, when his nationwide tour passed through Chicago and he started annoying David Letterman. The man who created one of the all-time great comic characters was Paul Reubens, who died this week at 70 after a long, private bout of cancer.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that Pee-wee Herman was one of the funniest and most complex comedy inventions of the 20th century. The manic man-child worked on multiple levels. He was beta meta. He was a rorschach test, mining Baby Boomer nostalgia and filtering it through Generation X's craving for irony and kitsch. He perfected the age-old tightrope walk of being, like the Monty Python troupe, both sophisticated and silly. "Pee-wee's Playhouse" was a sui generis children's show, an improbable Saturday morning hit popular with adults, whether hung over or straight. Nothing like it had aired before, and no one has matched it since.

Pee-wee was the ultimate puppet, personified. A Pinocchio come back to life. Reubens was trained at the Groundlings in the 1970s, at the ground floor of the comedy proving grounds that would produce generations of extremely funny performers, including Lisa Kudrow, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Jan Hooks ("There's no basement at the Alamo!"). Some of the talent to pass through the Playhouse: Phil Hartman, Laurence Fishburne, Edie McClurg, Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne), S. Epatha Merkerson, and Natasha Lyonne as a child. (As well as talented voice actors and the music of Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh.)

Reubens was a talented actor in his own right, but Pee-wee was to him what the atomic bomb was to Oppenheimer. We have revisited his films in recent years. His debut, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," was the perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon, peaking at just the right time. Delirious. He couldn't really recapture the magic, though, whether it was a few years later with "Big-Top Pee-wee" or a few decades later with the limp "Pee-wee's Big Holiday" from 2016 (so funny I forgot to laugh).

To me, this was the perfect encapsulation of Pee-wee's naif aesthetic, rescuing the animals from a burning pet shop, sight gag after sight gag, all the while betraying his aversion to one scary type of reptile and culminating in a perfect punchline.

And such a graceful physical comedian.

I never outgrew Pee-wee. I still have the talking doll that they pulled off the shelves after he was arrested in Florida for exposing himself in a pornographic theater. (How quaint to think that that was a potential career killer at one time.) I'll never forget the image that the Associated Press sent over the photo wires, a side-by-side of the Pee-wee character with the Reubens mug shot. It was similar to this:

The concept of Pee-wee Herman was wrapped up in a faux nostalgia (one running gag mocked instructional films from the 1950s) and the desire to indulge our inner child. That Paul Reubens was able to do that in such a sophisticated way is a tribute to his genius as an artist. His romp through the '80s transformed the world from the grim '70s into a fresh three-dimensional technicolor existence. It was a youthful giddiness worth holding on to.