‘Pee-wee as Himself’: How Paul Reubens Created (and Disappeared Into) Pee-wee Herman

PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE, Paul Reubens, Chairie, 1986-90 — Everett Collection

If you’ve only known Paul Reubens in the context of his affable, excitable character Pee-wee Herman, get ready to see new facets of the late actor in HBO’s Pee-wee as Himself. The two-part documentary — both halves of which air on HBO on Friday, May 23, starting at 8pm ET — shows how Reubens and Herman were, for many years, inextricable. And that was largely by Reubens’ design.

In a trailer for the doc, Reubens says he wanted to be a performance artist, and “out of nowhere, Pee-wee Herman popped out.”

Before long, it was hard to see where Reubens ended and Pee-wee began, even for the actor. Reubens said in a 1981 CNN interview that he had been doing Pee-wee for so long that he had trouble not slipping into the character.

In the same interview, Reubens explained Pee-wee’s genesis. “Pee-Wee is a conglomerate of me and a couple of other little kids that I knew when I was a little kid,” he said.

During a production of Life With Father at Florida’s Asolo Repertory Theater, Reubens began playing his character in the play with a nasally voice. “And that was where Pee-wee’s voice came from,” Reubens said.

Reubens developed the character during his time with the Groundlings, an improv troupe in Los Angeles, where he shared the stage with Saturday Night Live’s Phil Hartman and mentored Elvira’s Cassandra Peterson. Pee-wee came to life in an improv assignment in which Reubens and his fellow Groundlings had to come up with a “character that one might encounter in a comedy club,” as the actor told Mental Floss in 2014.

He named the character Pee-wee Herman after a “Pee-wee” harmonica he had and an “off-the-wall” kid he knew. He thought the name sounded real, as he explained to Mental Floss. “And it went hand-in-hand with what I wanted to do,” he said, “which was to make people think this was a real person, not an actor.”

Reubens got Pee-wee’s suit from Groundlings co-founder Gary Austin and paired that outfit with a kid’s black bowtie that he later swapped out for a red bowtie. “And the white shoes were mine,” he said. “That’s just sort of what I put on, and I had success with it, so I thought, why mess with it? If it ain’t broke.”

Pee-wee made his debut on the Groundlings stage in 1977 and then appeared on The Dating Game in 1979, but soon it was time to give the character a bigger platform.

“Towards the last year [at the Groundlings], I needed to expand Pee-wee into something else,” Reubens said on CNN. “I had about a 10-minute standup act that I was doing as Pee-wee, and I really needed to expand that and do something different with it because I wasn’t really a standup comic. So I got this idea to put him in a playhouse and develop a show along the lines of the old kid shows in the ’50s, and the rest is history.”

That history starts with a show called The Pee-wee Herman Show staged at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theatre and then filmed for a 1981 HBO special. The stage version’s humor skewed more adult — with sexual themes more overt than those of Pee-wee’s later appearances, according to The New Yorker — though Reubens’ matinée performances at the Roxy ranged more family-friendly, according to Mental Floss. The show included one of the earliest televised performances by Phil Hartman, one of Reubens’ fellow Groundlings, who played Captain Carl.

Then came multiple appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, the 1985 Tim Burton film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and the 1988 sequel Big Top Pee-wee, and, of course, the CBS children’s show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which ran from 1986 to 1990.

On screen, Reubens disappeared into the persona. Pee-wee’s Playhouse lists “Pee-wee as Himself” among its acting credits, and now, that’s the title of the HBO documentary, in which Reubens recounts his life story.

HBO calls the doc “the definitive portrait of the comedic performer, and a window into his never before discussed personal life,” with the first part devoted to Reubens’ rise to fame and the second part devoted to the legacy of both the actor and his most famous creation.

“Determined to correct the record and tell the factual story of his life, Reubens excavates his kaleidoscopic influences, origins in the circus and avant-garde performance theater, and career choices, while reflecting on the reasoning behind, and the consequences of, severing his beloved alter ego from his authentic self,” HBO says in a press release.