Mon. Jun 23rd, 2025

Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens: Welcome to the Playhouse

By Subversify Staff Jun 9, 2025

Two of the most ingenious performers of the 1970s and 1980s were Paul Reubens and Andy Kaufman.

Their paths never crossed directly, at least on-screen.

But Paul Reubens was a fan of Andy’s work, and considered him an influence. They met at a time when Andy was winding down and professionally frustrated, whereas Paul was just up and coming.

They were both very talented and similar in the way they loved performance art. But in many ways, they were polar opposites.

Andy hated playing one-note characters and got tired of being Latka or Bad Guy Wrestler. He was always pushing hard for something “new.”| He wanted to be known as a versatile comedian/actor/singer, like many of his peers, and someone who embodied the funny-intellectual rebellion of the times.

Perhaps he never understood a bit of minutia that Paul learned early on.

The world isn’t interested in complication or complexity. They want easy, simple, relatable, and feel-good. Andy fought hard to force us to think bigger, smarter, and deeper. It never quite worked.

Paul knew that while he was capable of playing so much more, the world took note of Pee-Wee because he was a living cartoon, just a whim, a siren that asked us to follow him.

You might say Pee Wee was a one-note character that not only embodied the spirit of Gen X but also matured with the times and took his fans with him on a reluctant, coming-of-age journey.

Pee Wee Herman was the perfect character at the perfect time. He was an outcast, a gender-agnostic sort of man-child who was exploring the basic premise of what it means to be happy, oblivious of the real world around him.

Simple things made this simple man happy, and that’s what was curious to us. Pee Wee had a Muppety quality that was distinctly 1980s, with a surrealistic demeanor that always made you wonder if he was serious or just “performing.”

The fact that Pee Wee had a ‘creator’ and a much deeper persona who gave him life was irrelevant, at least until the very end.

Paul was savvy enough to know that showbusiness is about the show – the one story you’re telling, and the character that we, the audience, can follow down this path. Someone who teaches us something about ourselves.

The world only listens to us for so long.

Even when Paul was forced to explore other characters, he never reached the zenith of Pee-Wee again, nor did he try very hard to make the world forget his 15 minutes.

He was a great actor and a great mind, but he was smart enough not to fight against the current. He knew this was his contribution to the arts, and he made peace with that.

Andy Kaufman was deliberately confrontational instead of peaceful or precocious, like the Pee-Wee character.

It’s almost as if he wanted to make people understand that artists are deeper and more profound than the stories they tell.

But it was “against current”, and a lesson that the world just wasn’t ready to learn yet.

‘We’re all Artists and this is the whole of us making a statement’ was post-2010 consciousness. What we understand now.

Andy thought ahead of his time, Paul was right on time.

And in the end, Andy Kaufman gave Paul the go-ahead to do his own take on The Andy Kaufman Funhouse idea, a pilot he filmed.

Paul revamped Andy’s vision into his own iconoclastic acid trip of an educational show.

Since Kaufman lived long enough to see the beginnings of Pee Wee’s career one can’t help but wonder if Kaufman – a dadaist to the end – really got the art of what Paul Reubens was doing.

A method acting approach to comedy, but without the wink-at-the-audience metahumor. It was so old-school and so Vaudevillian, so “kayfabe” to borrow a phrase, it was truly avant-garde.

It was a flirtation between the entertainer and the audience, giving us moments instead of lessons, laughs instead of deep thoughts, and memes instead of rational conversations.

What would Andy have said to Pee Wee anyway?

My bet is that Andy would have shoved Paul and started a fight…of course, all for the benefit of the bewildered audience.

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