In the time before geek culture was mainstreamed, there were fewer places where people could be outsiders and still feel acceptable in polite society. This isn’t a “David Bowie showed me it was okay to be weird” piece, though I think those sentiments somewhat apply. The difference between Bowie and Paul Reubens is that Bowie was being himself and letting others come to him. Reubens was not only being himself, but he was creating a literal space intended for children that showed them how loved they were, no matter how they presented to the world. Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, though not my favorite Reubens material, is easily one of the most important shows of the 1980s and, I’d argue, children’s television all time.
Now yes, we have other shows like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street – both shows I equally adore and respect – that espoused similar thoughts and values. The difference is that while those shows told you that “it’s you I like” or “these are the people in my neighborhood,” it did so through a very traditional lens. Again, I can’t stress enough how this is not me ragging on those shows. When Fred Rogers washed his feet in a baby pool with a gay black man on television, it changed everything. When Latinx kids finally saw people who looked like themselves interacting with Big Bird, it opened up the TV world to heretofore ignored people.
But adding Pee-Wee’s Playhouse to the mix was taking it an extra step. Yes, Mr. Rogers and Grover accepted you, but Pee-Wee was different. While walking down Sesame Street, you’d encounter muppets or kids, but no one would scream in your face whenever you said a word that they didn’t know was a secret. No one in the Land of Make Believe would put tape all over their face and dance like a person getting electrocuted. While Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood accepted you no matter what you looked like, you had a place in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse no matter what you felt like or how you expressed that.
Every part of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse tried to do things left of center. The music made for the show featured some of the great weirdos of pop music: Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, Danny Eflman, Dweezil Zappa, Van Dyke Parks, the fucking Residents! The animation did the same, introducing the world to Aardman long before Wallace and Gromit or digging out old public domain cartoons. The show’s supporting cast was made up almost exclusively of non-white men, whether it is the delightfully horny Ms. Yvonne, the Black Reba the Mail Lady and Cowboy Curtis, or the Latino lifeguard Tito. After Phil Hartman left the show, the only other regularly occurring white dude was the fantastic John Paragon as Jambi, who was slathered in blue face paint and didn’t present as a straight white guy.
And, while Reubens never talked publicly about his sex life, he presented as queer in a time when that was a shocking thing for any celebrity to do, especially someone associated with children’s entertainment. But the amount of shirtless guys, over the top kitsch, and not so subtle innuendo made it clear that Pee-Wee was not going to settle down with Ms. Yvonne and have kids.
Every year, my family watches the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas special, one of the truly excellent holiday classics, and when you watch it through a 2020s lens, you can’t help but notice how Reubens was clearly trying to expose kids to not just diversity for diversity’s sake, but to create truly progressive television. The show featured a guest list that was drawn equally from pop culture artifacts (Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Dinah Shore, Little Richard, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charo) and current celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, k.d. lang, Whoopi Goldberg, Grace Jones, Joan Rivers, Magic Johnson, Cher), plus the weird LA performance art meets kitsch act the Del Rubio triplets. Look at that list for a second: Frankie Avalon is the sole white man. k.d. lang was unapologetically queer, Little Richard was not exactly a gay icon, but was not hiding his gay history, even if he (at times) disavowed it. The guests are also overwhelmingly black and, for its 1988 airdate, this was not common at all.
Continued belowI was six years old when that special aired, and I didn’t think it was strange that the show didn’t feature who I thought of as the big stars of the day from my suburban white world. I just accepted that these people were important because Pee-Wee told me they were. And he never really told me they were, he just showed me that they were by how he interacted with them.
While I could sit here and talk about his cameo as the Penguin’s dad in Batman Returns or his role as the Spleen in Mystery Men, or quote you the entirety of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure from memory, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse raised an entire generation of people like me to not be as afraid of being an outsider as the generations before us. Even when the real world seemed scary and unaccepting, Pee-Wee was there behind the red door of the Playhouse to welcome us in, sit us down on Chairy and never ask us to change a damn thing about who we were.
That trickles down to literally every part of my life. I am more open about who I am – a comic reading, quick to cry, music-obsessed, artichoke chomping middle aged man – because of this show. Pee-Wee’s show also did all the important kids TV stuff to: be kind, share, clean up your messes, be a good friend, etc, but you could get that anywhere. The only place to get this particular brand of radical weirdness was paradoxically on CBS, the traditionally most conservative network, on a Saturday morning during the Reagan/Bush years. And while there have been lots of shows that have taken the ball and ran with it after Pee-Wee’s Playhouse ended, none of them could have done half of what the did without the foundation laid out by Rebuens and his team.
Again, you may be asking why Reubens is being discussed on a comics website. First of all, no television show ever had the chaotic energy of a comic more than Playhouse did, but the Playhouse was the one place on TV in the 80s where you could probably find a stash of comics and no one would look at you side-eyed for reading them. And while this has certainly changed for the folks reading comics today, the creators making today’s comics likely had to deal with some sort of social consequence from being a comics kid. Those same kids likely found solace in the overwhelming acceptance of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
Yes, he was arrested for jacking off in a porno theater. Yes, he was arrested for having some weird erotica in his home. Both of those “crimes” are absurd when looked at with any modicum of nuance. The world sought to discredit Reubens as an ambassador for kids because he was also very much an adult, and a (presumed) queer adult. But the fact that he was able to claw back from that to bring his show back to Broadway, back to Netflix for a new movie, and to the generation of kids whose parents were raised on his work shows that he is a testament to how authentic, sincere, and passionate Reubens was about his work.
I want to end with a quote that Reubens gave NPR’s Fresh Air 20 years ago.
“I felt like a total oddball almost every minute growing up. That sorta was the whole point of the show, or at least a big point of the show, was that it would be hard to stand out in the Playhouse. Everything stood out in the Playhouse, so you could feel right at home no matter who you are or what you were thinking or anything.”
Thanks, Paul.
