Paul Reubens, the comic actor whose childlike alter-ego Pee-wee Herman became a film and television sensation in the 1980s, and whose career was briefly derailed by a sex scandal in the early 1990s , died on Sunday. He is 70.
His death was confirmed Monday by his longtime representative, Kelly Bush Novak, who said he “privately battled cancer for many years with his trademark tenacity and intelligence.” He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Mr. Reubens had many acting credits in a career that began in the 1960s, including roles on “Murphy Brown,” “The Blacklist” and many other television series and in films such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer ” (1992), “Batman Returns” (1992) and “Blow” (2001).
But Pee-wee, a character he created in the late 1970s as a 10-minute bit when he was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, eclipsed all others, becoming a quirky and clever cultural phenomenon, a character aimed (at least in its TV incarnation) at children but listening to the sensibilities and ambiguities of adults.
After failing after an unsuccessful audition for the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 1980, Mr. Reubens created “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which was billed as a “live onstage TV pilot” and premiered in early 1981 at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. A national tour followed, and in 1981, HBO broadcast a version of it as a comedy special.
Pee-wee began watching late-night shows, especially “Late Night With David Letterman,” where the juxtaposition of the eccentric Pee-wee and the laid-back, slightly confused Mr. Letterman is comedy gold.
Then, in 1986, came “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a children’s version of Pee-wee’s world that aired on CBS for five years and carved a firm place in children’s memories of 1980s and, often, their parents.
“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” stands as one of the weirdest, wildest, most unclassifiable shows in television history. The androgynous Pee-wee and a wide collection of human and non-human characters — there’s, for example, Chairry, a talking armchair who hugs — depicted in every episode about, well, it’s hard to summarize. There was a word of the day. There are strange toys. In one episode, Pee-wee gets married to a fruit salad.
The show arrived in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration and returned to another button-down era, the life of Mr. Reubens as a child: in the 1950s.
“I saw it as very Norman Rockwell,” he told The New York Times in 2016, “but it’s my Norman Rockwell version of the ’50s, which is more all-inclusive.”
Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson and other actors of color are in the cast. Gilbert Lewiswho is Black, is the King of Cartoons.
“Not just anyone – the king!” Mr. Rubens said. “That came out of growing up in Florida under segregation. I felt really good about that.”
The show is a world away from typical educational TV for kids, its lessons — if any — delivered through wackiness rather than didactic, and its presentation decidedly non-linear.
“I never set out to do a big educational show,” Mr. Reubens told Newsday in 1989. “We’re trying to expose the kids to as much creativity as we can get into half an hour, so be entertaining and send some benign subliminal messages like nonconformity.”
It wasn’t long before the show was being studied by academics and cultural critics and its appeal to heavyweight papers and other commentaries, but Mr. Reubens is having none of that.
“I’ve been almost paranoid about dissecting it too much because the character has always been a kind of instinctual gut thing. I am able to turn it on and it flows quite a bit. I’m doing what I love and hoping it all comes together.”
The wheels fell off in July 1991, when Mr. Reubens on charges of indecent exposure at an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Fla., where he grew up. The arrest led to a small fine, but the headlines damaged his reputation.
“The moment I realized that my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and gender, that was really intense,” he told NBC in 2004. “That was something I knew from that moment, whatever happened after at that point, something was in the air that was really bad.”
Full obituary to follow.
