I loved Pee Wee as a kid. I always thought it was so stupid that the media made such a big deal out of his arrest. So what of he rubbed one out in a theater. Not a great move, granted, but our society is so incredibly sexualy repressed. It's sad that a character on screen can murder with impunity but God forbid someone masterbates. Things have changed a lot since the days of Pee Week's Playhouse though.
It especially bugs me because he was caught in a raid of a porno theater. People act like he was caught in an ordinary movie theater, because the zeitgeist has no room for details.
That wasn't all that happened though. The arrest happened in July, and then in September, when he appeared at the Video Music Awards, he was given a standing ovation. He was making a comeback until 2002, when he was wrongly arrested on child pornography charges, and then retired to take care of his father.
I think after having his reputation ruined twice was enough to convince him to lay low.
It is strange considering he played a crazed coke guy in Cheech & Chong, seems like that would have gotten more attention.[1][2] After growing up waking up Saturday morning to watch Pee-Wee (and Muppet Babies), this surprised me big time.
I am not an american and just read about that. It was so bizarre, can't believe thats what ended his career and made him "creepy". People dont want creeps around their children, i suppose.
I appreciate how much Pee Wee Herman was inspired by Pinky Lee. [1]
But Pinky Lee is from a different era, and his kid's show has none of that wonderful underlying creepiness and double entendres that Paul Rubens brings to the table. I love how Pinky is totally uncynical, earnest and straightforward with his manic ADHD stream of consciousness ad-libbed dialog, like when a little girl sitting in his lap interrupts him to ask about what happened to his finger:
"You know something, I told you before, I was hungry! I am! I'm starved! I didn't eat, I didn't eat breakfast or lunch. Yes honey?" "How did you hurt your finger?" "How'd I hurt my finger? Oh, about four weeks ago a monkey bit me! We had monkeys on the stage. And he liked me so much, he was jealous of the other monkey, and he bit me! See that? Oh, but it's getting well now. But you know, I'm so hungry, and I..." ring "Oh that's the telephone, 'scuse me!" [2]
He said of his work, "I was the cleanest comedian in burlesque… No violence. There are no gestures, alluding to the derriere or other parts of the anatomy. Words like 'lousy' or 'stinker' are absolutely verboten... It’s a happy, wholesome show."
He was so hyperactive, that when he collapsed on camera due to an infection, the cameraman and director presumed he'd ad-libbed the fall and it was part of his act, and the kids kept on cheering and clapping while he was writhing on the floor. [3] Which The Simpsons parodied in "Krusty Gets Busted".
Of course Pinky Lee could also do zany burlesque for an adult audience, too! [4]
Thank you! That was a great article -- you really nailed what I was trying to express with his story of how he was bitten by a monkey: "And I have to say, the times I smile, watching Pinky Lee on stage, are when I’m moved by how uncynical, unprocessed, and clean it is."
The live performing dogs in that same episode were absolutely mesmerizing, and it makes me really wish I could see the episode with the monkey that bit him!
Even though he sings and dances his own theme song about himself at the beginning of every episode, it comes off as totally charming, factually correct, and not in the least bit narcissistic:
Yoo hoo, it's me,
My name is Pinky Lee.
I skip and run with lots of fun
For every he and she.
It's plain to see
That you can tell it's me
With my checkered hat
And my checkered coat,
The funny giggle in my throat
And my silly dance
Like a billy goat.
Put 'em all together,
Put 'em all together,
And it's whooooo?
(Audience): Pinky!
As a Dutch guy brought up with BBC and other British humor (and dystopia but that is another story) I saw the movie when I was 10 or around that and found it very not funny. Humor has a lot to do with taste and I guess I am not a big fan of US humor (exceptions aside) and I think it is because of my British humor upbringing: I wonder if that is the other way around? For instance my Dutch friends who grew up like me with Fawlty towers, Monty
Python and Blakes' 7 (not a comedy but brilliant) hate Friends but love Seinfeld and the ones who only got Dutch and German and after that American humor love Friends and hate Seinfeld. No idea if this is just my sample group or if it is far more random than this.
Edit: remembered a few popular ones from my childhood: space balls and porky (forgot the complete name) which my friends in the above 2nd category liked and which made me scratch my brain out of boredom.
> You like Monty Python but not Spaceballs? I find that pretty weird.
DIfferent tastes for different people. I loved Monty Python from the first time I heard it on an audio record to the 10 times I watched each episode on PBS.
However, even as a Mel Brooks fan (Blazing Saddles is an all-time favorite of mine) I found Spaceballs un-funny and boring.
I find it weird you even name them in the same sentence but I am old enough to see this can happen and not one is better than the other. I find them very different though but again that is taste I guess.
> does not register as dated because Reubens designed him, from the jump, as untethered to any one moment in time
I happened to catch a more recent reincarnation (~2011?) of a stage performance of Pee-Wee on Amazon Prime. There was some entertaining references to decades past and Konky/Magic Screen were acknowledged to be a little 'out of date'.
I regularly complain about politics or current news articles here, but this is the kind of random, in-depth stuff that often times works well even if it's not directly startup/tech related.
I also think it's interesting Reubens developed an entire plan to resurrect his career from what is typically an irrecoverable disaster.
Performing his stage show in L.A. so that someone from a movie studio will "discover" him again and get psyched about a movie project? That's really really clever.
Urgh. He didn't 'hack his reality' any more than he knitted, cooked or birthed it.
Stop misappropriating words because they sound cool, there are whole dictionaries jam packed full of superb words, and its a lazy shame to lean on tedious zeitgeisty phrases.
Seriously, though, his use of the word hack was obviously intended to disarm the GGP's implied argument. It made me chuckle, and I think was a good word choice despite it's "tedious zeitgeistiness".
I also take issue with random startup management drama being on here like the "Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions" story.
I find "anything that good hackers would find interesting" kind of problematic. Good hackers according to who? Paul Graham? Silicon Valley capitalist culture? Please be more specific.
Also from HN's guidelines: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
The guiding value here is intellectual curiosity, which is gratified by running across things that are unpredictably interesting. HN has never been just about startups and tech. It's also about Byzantine coins, medieval manuscripts, Nabokov's butterfly expeditions, the tomb of Queen Esther, T.S. Eliot's letters, and Jim Henson's coffee commercials. Pee-wee Herman? Why not, if there's an interesting aspect to the story?
Stories that take us off the beaten track into the wild are the rare earth elements of HN, and we can never get enough of them. There's a strong tendency for everything to homogenize on a small number of hot topics. Those are exciting, but to let them crowd out the quieter, odder material is not how to optimize HN's long-term interestingness. We think it's great to have stories on the front page that defy expectation, and we consciously moderate HN to protect those when we see signs of community interest in them.
Of course people disagree greatly about what counts as interesting, but hey, if one oddball story bores you, another may hit the spot. Keep HN weird.
While I understand that everyone has their own idea of what should and should not be on Hacker News, must everything be regulated down to the gnat's whiskers?
I know everyone's afraid of the conversations deteriorating to the point that they no longer want to come here, but you can go the other direction with that too. You can regulate it so much that no one wants to come post or read.
I think there's a reasonable balance between the two (where that balance lies is something that many will surely disagree about also -- :-D ).
And, for the record, I could have lived without the Pee Wee Herman story also.
Because he has an abstinence ring and an iPad that Steve Jobs gave him and a robot and a talking chair and a magic screen and a globe that can show you maps and play music at the same time!
