By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Watching the two-part HBO Max documentary Pee-wee as Himself, it’s tempting to draw associations with a novel like Heinrich Böll’s The Clown or an opera like Pagliacci. Both are portraits of an artist who put on a costume of capering humor to mask a deep vein of pain.
It’s such a common character that the trope has a name: the “sad clown paradox,” defined as “those who make us laugh the most tend to be the most prone to mental health problems.”
The late-Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, would reject that interpretation outright — as he does in the stellar and affecting documentary bearing his stage name, which premiered on the streaming service in May.
Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman. Courtesy photo.
Calling Pee-wee as Himself a “documentary” is a little misleading. While it consists of the standard doc format of sit-down interviews interspersed with archival footage, Reubens himself demolishes the interviewer-interviewee edifice from the first frames. Straight out of the gate he questions the wisdom of making such a film and struggles openly with director Matt Wolf for control of the project.
Reubens makes it clear that unlike his iconic Pee-wee character — defined by a wild extroversion that used earnestness to veil impish subversion — his intense need for privacy is only rivalled by his unashamed need for total control and justified belief in his own genius.
Or was. That is to say, Reubens died in 2023 following a cancer diagnosis that he kept secret for six years. Even the documentary crew didn’t know he was sick until the very end, when he refused to continue participating but delivered a final message the day before he passed.
Meanwhile, Pee-wee as Himself ends up being far less the “sad clown” and more a tightly wound, contentious portrait of one of the most singular yet misunderstood artists of the 20th century.
For those who grew up in the 1980s and early-’90s, that might sound overblown. For that age group, Pee-wee was the frenetic, bow-tied resident of a mad-cap playhouse in which almost everything was a sentient puppet: the chair, the globe, a “magic screen,” the clock, the window, a kite, the flowers outside and even the floor (and more). There was also a disembodied genie’s head, a pteranodon, a band of jazz-playing cats and basically anything else Reubens decided to throw into the mix.
Pee-wee’s Playhouse was a staple of kids’ TV from 1986 to 1990, then rerun on Saturday mornings until mid-1991. Reubens’ movies — Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Big Top Pee-wee (1988) also solidified the character as a core memory for an entire generation.
Pee-wee as Himself, however, does what its title implies — or at least tries to: decenter Pee-wee Herman in order to let Paul Reubens explain who he really was, which was a revolutionary performer whose legacy belongs among the greatest conceptual comedians of all time, but continues to be overshadowed by the personal disgraces he suffered in the early 1990s and 2000s.
“More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something I wasn’t,” Reubens says in that final message before his death.
Of course, most people know he was dragged through the headlines following an indecent exposure arrest in 1991 (for which he pled no contest) and a raid on his art collection in 2002. (Though he eventually entered a guilty plea for misdemeanor obscenity, he vehemently denied anything in his collection was “obscene,” consisting of vintage erotica and kitsch.)
With all that baggage freighted into the second half of Reubens’ life, it would have been easy for Pee-wee as Himself to descend into a final settling of scores or a hagiography. Rather, it’s a gripping confessional and self-examination that reveals how little we actually knew Reubens, and are poorer for it.
The earliest parts of the story show Reubens growing up in New York, then Florida, where he was entranced by the children’s TV of the late-’50s and ’60s, then the circus. He later moved to L.A. and attended CalArts, where he flourished as an avant-garde performance artist who outshone even his most outre classmates. Reubens then performed on The Gong Show, followed by joining The Groundlings, which is where Pee-wee’s story really starts.
Amid those career moves Reubens was living openly as a gay man in a fiercely felt and committed relationship; but, as success mounted, he retreated to the closet, where he mostly remained for the rest of his life. Even decades after that relationship ended and his former partner had died of AIDS, Reubens still struggled talking about it.
Meanwhile, for those who only knew Reubens from Playhouse and his later arrests, it’s shocking to discover how enmeshed he was with the most cutting-edge comic artists then working: Phil Hartman, Cheech and Chong, Saturday Night Live and MTV being among some of his highest-profile associations. The first Pee-wee movie was directed by no less than Tim Burton (his first feature film) with music by Danny Elfman. Pee-wee’s Playhouse featured Hartman until he landed an SNL spot (for which Reubens appears never to have forgiven him), Laurence Fishburne (as Cowboy Curtis) and a very young Natasha Lyonne, among others. Guest stars included no less than Little Richard and Cher.
Just as Reubens went through a dark decade, he persevered and reinvented himself, enjoying if not a renaissance starting in the late-2000s, then at least a reaffirming of his boundless talent. Pee-wee as Himself is a masterful capstone to that talent, career and life, and should by all rights put Paul at least on an equal footing with Pee-wee for posterity.
