Pee-wee Herman
| Character | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Pee-wee Herman |
| Occupation: | inventor, farmer, comedian |
| Relationships: | N/A |
| Fandom: | Pee-wee's Playhouse, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-wee's Big Holiday, Big Top Pee-wee, The Pee-wee Herman Show |
| Other: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Pee-wee Herman is a comedy character created and portrayed by the American comedian Paul Reubens. He starred in films and television series during the 1980s. The childlike Pee-wee Herman character developed as a stage act that quickly led to an HBO special in 1981. As the stage performance gained further popularity, Reubens took the character to motion picture with Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, toning down the adult innuendo for the appeal of children. This paved the way for Pee-wee's Playhouse, an Emmy Award-winning children's series that ran on CBS from 1986 to 1991. Another film, Big Top Pee-wee, was released in 1988.
He is commonly portrayed as an impatient and fun-loving childlike man with dainty, effeminate mannerisms and quirky facial expressions. His age has never been explicitly stated; although, he once proclaimed on The Pee-wee Herman Show, "I'm the luckiest boy in the world". David Letterman once said of the character, "What makes me laugh ... is that it has the external structure of a bratty little precocious kid, but you know it's being controlled by the incubus – the manifestation of evil itself". While the character is typically cheerful and flamboyant, Pee-wee has indeed displayed an aggressive side, including his vicious pool battle with Francis in Big Adventure. He also played vengeful tricks in the aforementioned film and occasionally threw childish tantrums on Pee-wee's Playhouse. Reubens has said that he feels the character "resets" after each adventure, his experiences only changing him slightly, and compared him to Dorothy Gale at the end of The Wizard of Oz. In the Pee-wee's Playhouse episode Chairry-Tee Drive, Pee-wee flashes back to when he was a young boy (9 to 10 years old) while holding one of his old suits, suggesting that Pee-wee's current physical age was around his early 30s while his mental and emotional age is around age 10 to age 13. This is mentioned once by Pee-wee himself in the episode Now You See Me, Now You Don't during Knucklehead's botched joke and again by Miss Yvonne in Heat Wave, with a flashback to Pee-wee's childhood occurring in Chairry-Tee Drive.
It is revealed in Pee-wee's Big Holiday that his full name is Pee-wee Aloysius Herman.
Fanon
Before Pee-wee's middle name was revealed in 2016's Pee-wee's Big Holiday, some fans gave him the birthname of Herman Norman Reubens.
Other fans have built on Pee-wee's canon name, deciding "Pee-wee" was merely a nickname, and that his actual birthname is Peter Aloysius Herman.
It is a widely accepted and common fan theory that Pee-wee is AuDHD.
External Links
- Pee-Wee Herman character tag on Archive of Our Own