Paul Reubens as Himself
This Week I Watched the Documentary Pee Wee as Himself. Along with Learning More about Him and His Art, I Felt Touched and Sad
To show my appreciation for your steadfast understanding, patience and support as my inflamed and spastic back muscles heal, I am offering 60% off forever on new paid subscriptions and upgrades until today.
I want to celebrate Harvard University for not bending its knee to the Mump-Nazi Reich. Until today, I am offering faculty, staff and students with an .edu e-mail 50% off forever.
I hope more educational institutions, especially those in higher education, learn from Harvard’s and history’s example of colleges and universities remaining bold against tyranny and autocracy.
The Blues Brothers introduced me to Paul Reubens. I was 9 years old. Though his role as a Chez Paul server was brief, I remembered him as much as John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd and John Candy.
His simple delivery along with his simple facial gesture left their mark on me. As a little girl, I found him cute and funny and intriguing.
A few years later I would watch him perform as Pee Wee Herman, a character he had immersed himself into during the 1980s. On Friday nights or reruns, I would sometimes catch Pee Wee on David Letterman.
Then came Pee Wee's Big Adventure that he wrote with his then friend from The Groundlings Phil Hartman. The film has always tickled and delighted me.
Decades later my toddler and pre-school daughter laughed at and enjoyed Pee Wee too. I was so thrilled. We often watched his first film and episodes of his 1980s Saturday morning children’s show Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
We also watched Pee Wee’s Big Holiday when she was six. Below are my favorite scenes from Tim Burton's first feature film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Here Reubens's love of absurdity is on full display.
I was a college student when he was arrested in Florida during the summer of 1991. Even at 19, I knew Reubens was not the only man in an adult theater pleasuring himself in the dark (he denies doing so in the documentary). His celebrity though wouldn’t allow him to deal with the legal matter in private.
Before the arrest, he had burnt out from his Pee Wee character and chose not to renew his Saturday morning children’s show. Visiting his parents in the Sunshine State, he was no longer Pee Wee. He was just Paul.
He let his hair grow long and developed facial hair. But because he had performed as Pee Wee for years, fellow comedians and the Puritanical United States wouldn’t let the tabloid story go.
His fans supported him. Nonetheless, CBS chose to no longer air reruns of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The ridicule and shame made him insolate. He retreated into his depression that his friend Debi Mazar helped bring out of.
I learned from HBO’s documentary Pee Wee As Himself that it was after talking to those closest to him that Reubens chose to take control of the story’s reigns. He emerged once again as Pee Wee at the 1991 MTV Music Video Awards.
The incident ended up being a blessing in disguise. It freed Reubens to be the full actor and creative he always was. His later acting roles were in the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman Returns, Murphy Brown and Blow.
I also learned from Pee Wee as Himself that starting in childhood, Reubens felt driven to create and perform. The documentary made me see Reuben as an artist more than a comedian. The documentary showed videos of his work at the California Institute of the Arts. There he earned his BFA in performance art/theater.
Reubens also shared videos, photos and early underground films with the documentary’s director Matt Wolf, whom he often told he could not fully trust. Along with Reubens's need for control, the lack of trust also came from the 1991 adult theater incident and the spurious and ridiculous 2002 accusation of him being a pedophile with child pornography.
All Reuben had was vintage and contemporary adult male erotica. As a collector of vintage material, much of his homoerotic collection came from the 1950s and 1960s. But to end his legal stress that came at the hands of a career-ambitious prosecutor, he pled guilty to having obscene material. That guilty plea required him to register as a sex offender. All Reubens had were homoerotic images of adult men. No child pornography was found.
There are ignorant and bigoted people in the United States and the world who believe pedophilia and homosexuality are the same. They are not.
What made me sad about the documentary were two things. The first being that Reubens was targeted by a prudish and hypocritical country guilty of the very things he had been targeted for. The second was that Reubens felt forced to live as a closeted gay man.
Early in Wolf’s documentary, I learned that in the 1970s Reubens lived as an out gay man. For a time he lived with a painter named Guy whom later died of AIDS. Reubens shared photos and videos of him and Guy. After they broke up, Reubens knew that to succeed as an actor and a creative, he had to hide his truth.
How life could have been different if Reubens came of age today. Actors like Matt Bomer and Neil Patrick Harris are out gay men with successful acting careers. Both actors have portrayed heterosexual and homosexual men in their acting roles.
Reubens’s art and career should have flourished more. The power and success of his Pee Wee Herman character demonstrated he had the chops.
His life should have ended with him celebrating his partner and career. It should not have ended with a recording where he once again had to tell the world he was not a pedophile.
If you have access to HBO or Max, I encourage you to watch Pee Wee as Himself. I always enjoyed and appreciated Paul Reubens. I hope you do or will as well. I love Reubens and this documentary and plan to watch it several more times.
I will check it out. I also admired his wacky creativity and was saddened by how bad things got for him.