Pee-wee Herman Is the Best Friend a Gal Could Have
It’s been nearly 30 years since Pee-wee Herman’s last scripted feature film—Big Top Pee-wee, in 1988—and in the decades since, the cultish popularity of the character played by Paul Reubens has not waned. His 1991 indecent exposure arrest in a Sarasota porn theater couldn’t keep fans away (a victimless crime, but apparently America didn’t like its children’s entertainers caught jerking off in adult movie theaters), nor could his waning public visibility, sporadic until 2007. Pee-wee’s career was revivified in 2010 by a wildly successful Broadway show, but really what we were all waiting for was another scripted film—any one of those he suggested exist in, historically, his finest medium. But a full generation later, would his childlike comedy, a sensibility he honed in the 1980s, hold up?