Troy Reimink: ‘Pee-Wee’ star Paul Reubens deserved better than the cancellation he got | CPT PPP Coverage

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Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s remember who was usually on the receiving end of what we now call cancellation, and it wasn’t artists who were insufficiently “woke.” It was people whose private behavior seemed to reinforce the right-wing narrative about our culture’s supposed moral depravity.

The most glaring example from around that time might be Paul Reubens, the actor who created the beloved Pee-Wee Herman character and who died earlier this month at 70 of cancer.

In 1991, Reubens, star of the long-running kids’ show “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” was arrested in Florida for indecent exposure in a porn theater. This was huge news at the time, since the alleged crime was so sharply at odds with Reubens’ image as a beloved children’s entertainer.

And it is hard to overstate Pee-Wee’s importance to kids of a certain generation, even though he wasn’t initially created for us. Reubens developed the persona as a riff on 1950s kids’ programming while he was a member of the Groundlings sketch-comedy troupe, turning Pee-Wee into a successful stage act and talk-show mainstay.

“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” the directorial debut from filmmaker Tim Burton, was a surprise hit in 1985 and has aged into a beloved classic. (My family still teases me for how badly the Large Marge jump-scare freaked me out as a kid.)

The film’s success led to “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” which in retrospect is a strange project: an actual kids’ show based on a character who was a parody of a kids’-show star. Even more unusual at the time, it was Saturday-morning kids’ entertainment that didn’t talk down to its target audience, while delivering enough witty surrealism to captivate even the edgiest adults.

Pee-Wee’s house was a cheerful realm where anthropomorphic household items — Chairy, Globey, Mr. Window, etc. — were as full of life as the diverse cast of humans that came and went.

But the man behind the red bow tie was inscrutable. Reubens guarded his privacy fiercely, wearing disguises in public and dodging questions about his personal life. (There were rumors about his sexuality, although he never came out.)

The details of his arrest are pretty sketchy. He was in Sarasota, which is where he grew up and where his family still lived. Four officers from the sheriff’s department were undercover at a destitute, otherwise mostly empty adult-film parlor, where they apparently observed Reubens masturbating and took him in.

Those kinds of places were a little before my time, so pardon my ignorance, but what were they for if not … that? If there was nobody else there besides a few customers who were apparently outnumbered by cops, what harm was being done, and what public good was served by sending in the cavalry?

In any case, a local reporter recognized Reubens’ name in the police blotter, and the actor experienced the early-‘90s version of viral infamy, which meant news segments, late-night TV jokes and an incognito mugshot all over the supermarket tabloids. CBS pulled reruns of “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” and Reubens went into hiding.

At the time of his arrest, Reubens was preparing to step away from the show anyhow, seeking a creative life beyond his iconic character. But the uproar made that nearly impossible.

“An adult playing a child, he needed to be punished like a child for acting like an adult,” Rolling Stone magazine noted in 1991.

He appeared in a few small film and TV roles, but was derailed again in 2001 on a more serious charge: suspected possession of child pornography. But that case was soon dismissed when it was determined the images Reubens possessed, uncovered while police were investigating another actor, were merely part of a collection of vintage erotica.

Admittedly, Reubens’ offscreen life adds complexity to an artistic legacy — which also includes a sadly overlooked Pee-Wee reboot movie from 2016 — that never got the reappraisal it deserved while he was alive.

But those shadows do not seem dark enough to obscure the luminously weird space he created, one where every oddball was welcomed with no mandate but to be silly, sincere and decent.

“I know you are,” Pee-Wee might retort, “but what am I?”