The Pee-wee Herman Show

When I was a kid, I did the Pee-wee Herman dance. I bent my legs, spread them apart at strange angles, and put my hands stiffly towards my back. And then did this in and out. It's hard to describe:

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Perhaps the greatest musical episode in film? I don't know. It probably means more to me than most, just because Pee-wee was an obsessive part of my early childhood (I still have my Pee-wee's Playhouse sheets, and they are pretty rad: kid friendly abstract expressionism.)

So every kid who grew up in the late eighties, early ninties is familiar with Pee Wee, probably through either the Saturday morning show Pee Wee's Playhouse, and maybe also from the cult classic film, Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure. But the Pee Wee character has a long history before that, and something more attuned to performance art than simply silly comedy.

Not going to go into this history now, but I am going to provide some context. There are two seminal points for the Pee Wee character that are available to wide audiences: the Roxy Theatre performance that was taped for HBO in the early eighties, and then the series of appearances he did on David Letterman The Late Night Show, which in my opinion was the avant-garde of late night shows in the eighties. Letterman had guests like Harvey Pekar, Andy Kaufman, and Crispin Glover - mostly to make fun of them, but they really owe him for their popular success. It's a strange contradiction probably, with a late night show poking fun at his eccentric guests to get laughs, but still, I sense that Letterman understood what they were up to and appreciated it, but at the same time he had to play the straight, ego-centric man.

Which brings me back to this whole notion of performance - the seventies really pushed the boundaries of stand-up to a level outside the realm of punch lines and straight jokes. Source it to Lenny Bruce, but Kaufman and Paul Reubens were radical in the sense that the joke never ended. The realm between the real and the joke, the imaginary-playful thing and the reality where people's feelings get hurt, were completely disregarded. Kaufman could be the sweetest, or he could a real asshole, wrestling women.

But Pee Wee, when it began, was similar. Check out this clip:



Very very naughty boy, that Pee Wee. But the whole thing is that, at the end of the show, they follow that woman out into the streets. Pee Wee wanted people to think that she was actually hypnotized: he was in a sense taking on the role of the magician. And there really is some supernatural performance about this Pee Wee creation being live, that you would go to a comedy club and see something as ingenious as this in a real, living setting.

Anyone wanting to rent it or buy this Pee Wee classic, look up:
The Pee-Wee Herman Show - Live at the Roxy Theater (1982)
or click on it to buy it at amazon.