It’s 1996, and I’m sitting on a shaggy, brown carpet in my grandparents’ living room. My Woody, a stuffed bear I loved, is at my side, and my brother, who is a year younger than I am, is sitting a couple feet away from me. Our grandpa is in his usual position: on the couch at the other end of the room with his legs crossed and an unlit cigar hanging from the corner of his mouth. Our attention is focused squarely on my grandparents’ small television as a VHS of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure begins. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen it. This is the 10th or 11th time my grandpa has rented it for us from the video rental section of the Albertson’s down the street. Earlier that day, when we grabbed the box again, he pulled that unlit cigar from his mouth to say, gently, “Hey, maybe you guys should pick somethin’ new to watch” in his always-excited New York accent. But we didn’t budge. We wanted to see Pee-wee Herman prank Francis with trick gum, ride the bull at the rodeo, dance on the table of the biker bar near the Alamo, and, finally, find be reunited with his bicycle.
On that 10th or 11th viewing, we interacted with the film in a way we never had before. As we watched, we began to recite the dialogue back to the TV and to each other as the characters spoke. We then realized we could do that whenever we wanted, repeat a character’s odd jokes and goofs back again and laugh almost as hard as the first time we saw them. We found mutual comfort in watching this grownup act as we sometimes did, finding the comedy in the most mundane moments of his life, and treating other characters he encountered (except Francis) with genuine kindness and curiosity. We thought strange things were funny too — like a particular word repeated over and over again in a weird intonation — and we savored the opportunity to be in the presence of a person who felt the same.
This 10th or 11th viewing of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was the catalyst that opened the doors to the rest of Pee-wee’s Playhouse for me. When I was given a choice of what I wanted to rent from Albertson’s or Blockbuster, I found other VHS boxes with Pee-wee Herman’s name on them: a collection of Playhouse episodes and the Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas special. The more I watched, the more the Playhouse became a bright, hilarious, uncomplicated place for me when so much of what was happening in real life was confusing and decidedly unfunny.
Watching Pee-wee run around the Playhouse with the other characters felt real in a way the Power Rangers didn’t. The character of Pee-wee Herman didn’t feel like much of a character at all, actually, even though I knew, rationally, there was an actor behind the persona. I didn’t know then who Paul Reubens was, and I wouldn’t know him as anything but Pee-Wee until many years later when he played Spleen in Mystery Men. That’s part of what the new two-part documentary on Reubens, his alter-ego, and his career, Pee-wee as Himself, highlights: Reubens became the character of Pee-wee so entirely in order to succeed as an artist and control his public image that it took over nearly every aspect of his personal and professional life.
From the first moments of the documentary, there are some power struggles between Reubens and Matt Wolf, the director and producer of the documentary. Reubens begins his first interview for the series by telling a false story about his upbringing, and then immediately says he’s out of his “wheelhouse” because “everyone’s telling” him he “doesn’t have perspective” on his own life.
Wolf, who has spent the majority of his career making incredibly well-researched and well-produced documentaries on misunderstood cultural icons and phenomena, seems amenable to Reubens’s concerns. But you can also tell he is bristling a little at Reubens’s attempts to direct him. This initial tension sets the tone for the rest of the documentary. And before we even get to the part where Reubens openly admits it, it’s obvious he’s struggling to let go after so many years of carefully controlling and manipulating himself and the circumstances of his life in order to limit what people knew about him outside of his alter-ego.
After these first moments, we get to know how Reubens became the person he was. Throughout the narration, Wolf weaves in commentary from people who knew Reubens, along with archival materials from Reubens’s life.
Reubens and Wolf take us through Reubens’ birth in upstate New York and his family’s eventual move to Sarasota, Florida, which, at the time, was where the circus industry had their headquarters. It’s in Sarasota where Reubens first fell in love with performing, not just from watching Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody, and I Love Lucy on TV, but because he was surrounded by performers. He attended a sleepaway “circus camp,” and then became the “resident juvenile” at the historic Asolo Repertory Theatre. As a teenager, he became friends with other artists who had similar ambitions of creating for the rest of their lives and discovered the more conceptual works of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. Reubens and his friends’ dreams of living “an artistic life” eventually got him to CalArts, where he entered the acting program and spent his time experimenting with drag and making performance and conceptual art films that showcased his inclinations towards absurd and unusual storytelling.
Some people might be shocked to learn that many years before Pee-wee’s creation, Reubens lived his life as an out queer man. At CalArts, Reubens fell in love with a painter named Guy, and they lived together for some time in Los Angeles as Reubens was trying to carve out a career as an actor and performance artist. Reubens even came out to his family, and they were wholly supportive of him. But it wasn’t enough for him to keep “playing house” with Guy. Even among all of this personal happiness, Reubens felt like he was caught between having a successful career and being in a successful partnership.
In the end, Reubens made the decision to end their relationship and conceal his sexuality in order to keep pursuing his career — an early attempt to control the conditions of his life that might put him in a situation where he couldn’t achieve what he so desperately wanted. He explains, when the relationship ended, he vowed to not only not be openly gay but to also not be in a relationship: “I was going to advance my career because I could control that. So, it was extreme. I was as out as you could be and I went back in the closet.”
In these moments where Reubens is forced to unravel the most emotionally challenging parts of his life, the push and pull between him and Wolf appears heavily for the first time. It’s obvious, even after so many years, that Reubens is still struggling with the sacrifices he made to become the kind of artist he’d always dreamt he would be. While they might come off grating in another circumstance, the interactions slowly start to anchor the documentary in a harsh and difficult truth about Reubens’ life. You can see how, even before his career took off, Reubens’ public life became, for lack of a better comparison, a piece of lifelong performance art, where only he and a select few truly knew who he was when the performance came to a close.
The rest of this first part and the beginning of the second part focus on how Reubens finally broke into the mainstream. He landed a recurring role on The Gong Show where he discovered his love of comedy, then he eventually joined the now-famous improvisational comedy group, The Groundlings. At The Groundlings workshop, Reubens got to work with other comedians like Tracy Newman, John Paragon, Phil Hartman, and Laraine Newman and, for the first time, really began to understand the art of comedic acting and character development.
Pee-wee Herman was born from a workshop assignment, and the character took off in ways even Reubens couldn’t have predicted. After a failed attempt at auditioning for Saturday Night Live, Reubens decided to go all-in on Pee-wee, and as Pee-wee’s popularity in The Groundlings show took off, Reubens and other cast members organized a full, Pee-wee Herman stage show that began to sell out almost as quickly as the dates were released. They took the stage show on the road, and the character became a cult phenomenon that lead to Reubens being repeatedly booked — as Pee-wee, of course — on the The Late Show with David Letterman. Soon after, his movie deal came through and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was made. Following the enormous success of the film, CBS offered Reubens the chance to create his live-action children’s show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
Through it all, we watch Reubens attack each opportunity he was given with unbridled creativity, comedic dynamism, and sense of community responsibility. Along with bringing his Groundlings troupe-mates along at every turn, Reubens even enlisted the help of underground DIY punk artists like Wayne White and Gary Panter to create an early stage version of the Playhouse, eventually employing them on the CBS show. It’s obvious he wanted to be successful in his own right, but he also appears to have cared deeply about the success of the people around him as well.
At the same time, though, Reubens was working constantly to keep up with both his public image and the demands of creating a high-concept children’s show that met his impossibly high standards. He finally hit a flop with his second film release, Big Top Pee-wee, and then grew increasingly more burned out in the final years of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. We learn here that, like most artists, Reubens’s sense of control extended outward to everything he touched. He felt unable to trust others with his vision, and this constant pressure took a mental and emotional toll on him and the people he worked with. At the end of the fifth season of Playhouse, Reubens decided he needed a break.
Here is where the documentary turns because it’s at this point that all the control of his public image began to absolutely wear him down. He managed to achieve everything he wanted, but at what cost? He was placed in a position where he was forced to rebuild some semblance of an actual self out of the years of being someone else. You can see the fissures begin to really take shape as he tries to make sense of it all: “I wasn’t sick of being Pee-wee Herman, I wasn’t fed up with it. I should’ve broken it up with a little vacation. You know, there was six or seven years in a row, with an additional 10 or 15 years prior to that of just being obsessed and driven. To a very, very large degree, I could control that. I had a lot of control in that, and then, I didn’t.”
The back half of the second part of the documentary shifts its focus to Reubens’s 1991 arrest in Sarasota and his 2002 arrest and arraignment in Los Angeles. The narration of these parts of Reubens’s life are absolutely heartbreaking and showed how, each time, he was forced into periods of reclusiveness that upended his public and private lives. Although the 2002 arrest is more obvious in this sense, both arrests reveal our society’s parasocial fascination with celebrities and how we punish them when they don’t live up to our expectation of who they are and who we want them to be.
As I watched Reubens and his friends discuss these parts of his life, I was instantly reminded of situations like George Micheals’ 1998 arrest, where queer men are baited into “illegal” activities or accused of doing something illicit when there was no true “deviant” behavior afoot aside from being famous and gay. In Reubens’s case, his 1991 arrest loomed so large in the public imagination that when he was arrested in 2002 on what the state of California admits were completely bogus charges, people couldn’t register the possibility of him being innocent, even when the charges were dropped. It took until 2016 for Reubens to regain a little more control of his legacy again with the release of Pee-wee’s Big Holiday through Netflix, and that still doesn’t prevent him from being a punchline to this day.
As the back half of the second part continues, Reubens begins to shut down in a way he hadn’t yet. Where the first part shows Reubens willing and able to at least make jokes about the tougher moments of his life, the second part forces him to completely disengage from that possibility. Wolf wants Reubens to be as open as he was in the prior interviews, but Reubens has difficulty believing Wolf when he says he wants to portray Reubens in the most honest and graceful light he can. We never get a final interview with Reubens to discuss the aftermath of his 2002 arrest, and Wolf and his crew find out too late that for the six years prior to filming the documentary, Reubens was fighting a cancer diagnosis that would eventually take his life before they could complete the documentary together. Reubens performs one last act of faith the day before he dies and records a short monologue for Wolf, as if to supplement his inability to fully be there for Wolf and the audience at the end of documentary’s production. In the final part of the recording, Reubens says something that I and so many other people who grew up loving him already knew: “I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity to young people and to everyone.”
As hard as some of the moments of the documentary are to watch, I was reminded constantly of what drew me to Reubens’ work as Pee-wee and why so much of it has stayed with me. I didn’t know he was queer when I was first introduced to him in 1996, but I knew I saw so much of myself in him — the love of the absurd, the playfulness, the willingness to take a joke to its furthest extreme, the inventiveness, and the belief that a better world was out there and we could build it, even if it was just one “Playhouse.” So much of what he taught remains buried inside of me, and I know his work was an essential building block in creating my sense of humor. He also showed me how art is a lifeline that can help carry us through all of the highs and lows of our lives. Even now, when I make jokes, I know I say certain things in inflections I learned from him.
Reubens was never a punchline to me, but this documentary completely shatters the illusion that it was acceptable for him to be a punchline to others. More than that, Pee-wee as Himself provides a dignified, deeply affecting portrait of an artist who wanted so badly to make us laugh that he sacrificed much of himself for those ambitions. For that sacrifice, he was punished by an ungrateful and carceral society who forgot how much he loved the world.
Pee-wee as Himself is now streaming on HBO Max.
