Left: Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas in Taxi, 1979. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Right: Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, 2009. AP Photo/Danny Moloshok.

Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens both appeared on the hit TV show The Dating Game, but not as themselves. If you had tuned in on a Wednesday night in 1978, you might have seen a rather weird bachelor amid the usual roll call of dudes with disco medallions. While the other contestants were all throwing scripted innuendos at one lucky lady, there was Andy Kaufman! Except it wasn’t him, not exactly. He had shown up as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character, Latka Gravas, whom he would soon make famous on NBC’s show Taxi (1979–1983. But no one knew who that was yet. On the show, it all got pretty discombobulating. He was grinning like a boy who’d just discovered what fire could do to his Action Man; he deliberately misunderstood the jokes, and squealed “I won!” when he didn’t win, all somehow earning him the gleeful indulgence of the studio audience. What the hell was that?

A year later, a certain Pee-wee Herman was on the same show, a then-unknown overgrown boy in a glen plaid suit and red bow tie, played by a twenty-seven-year-old actor called Paul Reubens. Looking like Buster Keaton’s unhinged son, sounding like a hyperactive imp on a sugar high, he had the audience giggling like drunk hyenas soon, too. Crashing The Dating Game wasn’t some sort of elaborate scheme Andy and Paul hatched together, but it’s nice to think about them in split screen: two cartoonish instigators of live-action anarchy, tricksters without any malicious purpose, making comedy out of these unusual characters.

It’s a good time to investigate the paradoxes and special strangeness of Kaufman and Reubens, who are oddly alike in some ways and so different in others. Two fascinating new documentaries try to puzzle out the stories of these two much-missed entertainers. (Reubens died at age seventy after a battle with cancer long-kept secret, in 2023; Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, when he was just thirty-five.) Matt Wolf’s Pee-wee as Himself and Alex Braverman’s wacked-out portrait of Kaufman, Thank You Very Much, provide the best accounts of what powered their singular shenanigans, not to mention the trouble they got themselves into once they crash-landed in the world of showbiz.

Personally, I like to imagine a documentary about both of them. Or a great buddy movie, maybe with Nicolas Cage as Andy and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. Two Inscrutable Jews! Andy Kaufman from Great Neck, Long Island, and Paul Reubens from Sarasota, Florida. Two oddball products of Eisenhower-era suburbia, who spent their childhoods in staring contests with the TV, bewitched by fun-for-all-the-family entertainment: The Howdy Doody Show, I Love Lucy, The Little Rascals. Kaufman, the Philip Roth–level satyr with a sweet tooth (“He was kind of a sex addict,” his former partner Lynne Margulies cheerily remembers in the documentary); and Reubens, the willowy boy who dressed up as a princess on Halloween.

In a 2009 chat with Reubens for Interview magazine, Paul Rudd observed the Kaufman-esque vibe of that Dating Game appearance and wondered whether he was an influence. “I was very influenced by him. I liked his work, and I knew him a tiny, teeny bit,” Reubens said. I couldn’t find any quotes of Kaufman talking about his contemporaries. That wasn’t really his style.

But among other things, Andy Kaufman may have been the architect of Reubens’s Saturday morning TV masterpiece, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Kaufman made a six-minute skit called “Uncle Andy’s Funhouse” for the TV show Buckshot in 1980. Kaufman’s best friend and coconspirator, Bob Zmuda—a man who used to run around the Central Park Zoo with Kaufman, screaming, “The lion’s out!”—once called it “a kids’ show for adults” that never got made into a full-grown show. An IMDb trivia page claims that before he died, Kaufman approved of Reubens mutating the Funhouse into the Playhouse before he died. While the formats are similar, the two shows are weird worlds unto themselves, two “houses” that are alike in their eccentricity but it may be the only contest where Kaufman comes out looking slightly more “normal”: he runs upstairs in a hula skirt to yell at his parents (actors); Pee-wee chats with a talking globe. They’ve both disappeared into characters that seem to have beginnings and no ends.

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Inscrutability can be a performer’s best friend—it makes everything more real and unpredictable—but Kaufman’s and Reubens’s careers also offer lessons in its potential risks and pitfalls. In the interviews with Matt Wolf that make up Pee-wee as Himself, combined with thousands of hours of material from Reubens’s personal archive, Reubens comes off as, yes, a total sweetheart and a congenital mischief-maker, teasing and bedeviling Wolf at every turn. It’s wild fun to watch, but you also know he’s also hiding things he feels the need to conceal, including the cancer diagnosis he kept secret from the public and from Wolf. Previously deeply private about his sexuality, he discusses his deep romance with the handsome painter Guy Brown before the creation of Pee-wee. Severely freaked out by how he “lost [his] entire personality by being involved with someone else,” he swore off any long-term romantic relationship, dedicating himself to his career. His famous creation materialized not long after, partially shaped by Brown’s mischievous spirit. But Reubens was in love and ached from the loss. He’s close to tears when recalling Guy’s death from AIDS-related illness four decades earlier.

Reubens also admits he’s quite the control freak, and secretive as a Cold War spy. “I’m not a trusting person,” he tells the director, straightforwardly. Fathoming the reasons for this isn’t exactly rocket science. “My career,” Reubens observes, “would have absolutely suffered if I was openly gay.” Eventually, he stops cooperating with Wolf on the documentary, uncertain about whether it will tell the story he wants, keen to shape the entire thing himself.

Maybe Reubens is sometimes coy because he’s baffled by the inexplicably charmed story of Pee-wee Herman. The character was solid gold right from the beginning, a hit with audiences as soon as Reubens slipped into the outfit he found in a cardboard box backstage at the Groundlings headquarters. He was ready to show you his cool toys, offer wisdom (“I was using my imagination. I was being creative. You can do it at home, too”), cackle with glee, or yell a snotty playground insult: “Act your age, not your IQ!” By 1981, he was the star of a sellout show. De Niro and Scorsese came to check it out one night, maybe taking notes for The King of Comedy (1982).

Soon he was a real pop-cultural phenomenon, he was on on school lunch boxes; he was a doll you could get for Christmas. But in retrospect, none of that success seems to have been guaranteed. Reubens was a CalArts alumnus enthralled by the Warhol superstars. After college he was all set to join an offshoot of the legendary anarchist drag collective the Cockettes. He played a “mermaid version of Cher” in a trippy video long before Cher appeared in a movie called Mermaids (1990). In Super 8 footage of Reubens as a stoned sylph wreathed in sequins and fur, experimenting with various drag looks, it’s giving Rrose Sélavy via Peter Hujar. He referred to his Pee-wee act as “performance art” plenty of times.

And then there’s the matter of his two arrests: the first for public exposure in a Florida porno theater while Pee-wee’s Playhouse was on hiatus in 1991; the second on trumped-up child pornography charges in 2003. He owned a vast quantity of vintage erotica, much of it stashed in unopened boxes. Keen to make headlines during election season, the LAPD desperately isolated one potentially ambiguous image out of thousands and tried to skewer him with one count on the reduced charge of obscenity. Reubens protested his innocence in both cases and pled no contest.

You might say he became a victim of his own too-successful character. Reubens was wholeheartedly invested in and identified with being Pee-wee, almost never interviewed or making any sort of public appearance out of character. Wolf’s documentary includes footage of Connie Chung referring to Herman’s lawyer in a news bulletin, as if the character had been arrested, Reubens not even mentioned. The wicked dissonance between the public sprite and the meth-lab Gandalf in his infamous Florida mug shot felt acute indeed. Was it Borges or Liz Taylor who said, “Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst?”

And indeed, forty years later, nobody seems to know who Andy Kaufman really was, either, not even Zmuda. Remembering Kaufman from our own deranged present in Thank You Very Much, Zmuda says, “It was like working for Harry Houdini. They weren’t jokes, they were illusions.”

Kaufman was a great actor: fearless, able to convince you he really meant whatever he did. And yet he didn’t seem interested in playing anybody that didn’t come out of his head. But that’s a flaw only if you’re interested in the usual way of doing things. It’s fun to imagine Kaufman doing what Reubens did in Blow (2001), for example, and giving a sly and sensitive performance as a campy, drug-trafficking hairdresser. But maybe he would’ve shown up as somebody who wasn’t even in the script, just for fun. Why does the performance have to stop “here” rather than “there”? And decided that, anyway?

If Kaufman felt that what he was up to was performance art, of course, he wasn’t telling. There’s no record of him talking about Fluxus; there’s just his friend Laurie Anderson in Thank You Very Much telling the story of hanging out with him at a Coney Island funfair and deliberately antagonizing ferocious carnival workers. Performance art, a goof, a mad risk, or all of the above. He went on TV and told David Letterman about three men who’d mugged him recently, and announced he was going to adopt them as his adult sons. Or he slow danced with his beloved Grandma Pearl. Maybe it was just a private game he was playing, and he was totally untroubled by anything other than his own personal definitions of success and failure. Consider this scene from Julie Hecht’s account, in her book Was This Man a Genius? Talks with Andy Kaufman (2001), of trying to profile him for Harper’s Magazine at his peak, circa 1979. It sounds like hanging out with Don Quixote. Author and subject show up at a Manhattan restaurant just before closing time. He tells the maître d’ they have a reservation, but in the voice of a fusty aristocrat.

“I’m very sorry but I just phoned and was told I would be served if I arrived before one.”

“It is almost one now,” said the maître d’.

Sir Andrew of Kaufmanshire retorts in his faux-British accent, “Almost—but not yet one.” Dinner is served. Robin Williams noted on the 1995 TV special A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman, “Andy made himself the premise, and the world was the punch line.”

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Does anybody else feel high? Perhaps it isn’t a surprise to learn that Reubens and many members of the production design team on Pee-wee’s Playhouse were sustained by plenty of Cali weed. The set for the show was one of the great artworks of the eighties. Every inch was psychedelic, from the acid-flashback patterns in the carpet to the butterscotch-colored sphinx on the roof, which was designed by the William Blake of LA’s punk artists, Gary Panter. Pee-wee is talking to a hot Black cowboy who was in Apocalypse Now. (Laurence Fishburne!) Ah, the walls are melting. Is Chairry a mint-green talking chair or a mint-green talking hippo? Every episode’s secret word makes the whole set explode (“Fun!”), just like when you and your pals get tickled into Jell-O by a stoner in-joke.

Meanwhile, led astray by too much On The Road in his teens, Kaufman ran away from home and spent a year living in a Long Island park, transmogrifying from nice boy to wastoid on a diet of brain-frying substances that would’ve spooked Dennis Hopper. LSD, DMT, STP, Dexedrine, rivers of booze “every day!” as he recalled in an interview. “Every day!” Luckily, Transcendental Meditation tweaked those brain waves to a different frequency, and from 1969 onward, he was almost a parody of a new age person in his squeaky-clean disavowal of anything remotely “toxic.” (Except when he was being his lounge singer alter ego, Tony Clifton, bellowing like a hungover sea lion—then it was time for cigarettes and whiskey.)

Pretty much everything Kaufman did was trippy, though, because he messed with the whole concept of funny. Once, at a comedy club, he ate a bowlful of chocolate ice cream onstage. The act was the classic Cheshire Cat switcheroo: the normal way of doing things was suddenly revealed to be nonsense. You could toil for years to nail three minutes of sassy one-liners, or you could go somewhere can name. Like Syd Barrett asked, “What exactly is a joke?”

At the same time, much of their material was uncannily familiar. Reagan was in the White House and everybody was getting flashbacks to the fifties. Cute surfaces, strange depths: all-American aesthetics rendered darkly or sweetly perverse. David Byrne wandering around Texas in a Stetson like a Martian at a barbecue in his movie True Stories (1986). The Norman Rockwell suburbs seething with psychosexual nightmares in Blue Velvet (1986). Cindy Sherman, the all-American girl from Glen Ridge, New Jersey, mutating every time she raided her dress-up box. Was she a scared bobby-soxer or a femme fatale from a film noir that you half remember? Pee-wee materialized with a delicious party bag full of chaos. What was he up to? Like Kaufman, he was creating demented echoes of his childhood programming, equal parts vaudeville and avant-garde, simultaneously wholesome and weird, a heartwarming tribute to tradition and a sly parody of it. Look at Kaufman lip-syncing to the theme song from Mighty Mouse: “Here I come to save the day!” Or see the touching spectacle of Kaufman talking with Howdy Doody on his 1977 special Andy’s Funhouse, as if the puppet were a real person: “The first friend I ever had.” If they make you feel like you’re zonked on psychedelics, it’s partly because they crack open a portal to a certain childlike wonder. It’s a world in which, as Glenn O’Brien pointed out in his epic exegesis on Pee-wee for Artforum, “everything is enchanted.”

As soon CBS gave Reubens the green light, he was on a mission. He tells Wolf that he knew at once that “I can be the beacon of being like, It’s okay to be different.” No big deal was made out of the fact that the cast was multiracial at a time when this was extremely rare. When Reubens confesses “there was gay subtext in Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” he can barely hide his mirth: a big reveal of the most obvious thing in the world. Who’s that knocking at the cherry-red door at the height of the ultrahomophobic Reagan era? A who’s who of LGBTQ royalty: Cher! Grace Jones! Little Richard! And that’s just the Christmas special. It was kind of radical, given that the president didn’t even say the word AIDS until 1985.

As gentle as he could be, Kaufman had a compulsive appetite for creating scandal and confusion that was baffling then and would be career suicide now. The man who canceled himself! A troll before troll meant that. He got himself voted off SNL for being so infuriating. Imagine somebody today publicly seeming to turn their comedy career into a side hustle while they become the “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the United States,” a loudmouth schlub who insists he fights only women on various TV wrestling franchises, taunting the audience, feasting on their boos and getting rewarded with a hailstorm of popcorn and Coke.

Everybody’s grown familiar with the concept of actors staying in character off set but this was way before all those stories about Daniel Day-Lewis making his own canoe for The Last of the Mohicans. You’re falling fall through a whole other trap door when you remember that Kaufman caused all this trouble as “Andy Kaufman.” It’s not as if many people were even in on the joke. The actress Carol Kane told me that after he was pile-driven by Jerry “The King” Lawler during a wrestling match and bundled off to the hospital, the cast of Taxi “thought he was actually in [the] hospital, and we sent him magazines and fruit baskets. And then Danny [DeVito] watched the tape of the match and slowed it down—it was fake!”

Some people still think Andy Kaufman isn’t dead. He’s been sighted, among other places, at a Walmart in New Mexico. Zmuda cryptically suggests that “if he wasn’t dead, he’d be faking his death.” Is he secretly watching Nathan Fielder’s reality-mangling antics on The Rehearsal and giggling with approval? Why did he work as a busboy while he was on Taxi? He was like some mythological creature that exists just to bewilder people and bask in their responses.

Underneath all the chaos, there may have been peace, maintained by a deep internal purpose. Thank You Very Much points out the influence of Transcendental Meditation: The straitjacket of the self does not exist. Rather than lamenting what you supposedly are, explore what you could be, whether that’s Elvis, a wrestler, or somebody who screams “You’ll Never Walk Alone” while thrashing a hi-hat on The Mike Douglas Show. Forty thousand dollars is only a financial loss; it doesn’t mean real failure. Accept good or bad reactions as beautiful in their own way. “Let be be finale of seem,” in the words of Wallace Stevens, but in front of a live studio audience, ideally. “He was so courageous,” Kane told me, “because he never broke character. He was so honest and true to whatever he wanted to construct as an artist. He never let on. He never winked.”

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I called Kane, the sui generis Upper West Side Good Witch from such classics as Scrooged (1988), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Addams Family Values (1993). She knew them both. She acted with Kaufman as Latka’s girlfriend, Simka, on Taxi, and was pals with Reubens for years, stepping out with him for his first public appearance in LA following his infamous Florida arrest. They had dinner at a restaurant; the press was there. “Paul arranged it all,” she said. “He did it very elegantly.” Happily recalling Kaufman, she said, “He felt that rehearsal was not the best thing for his particular process. During the week you had to rehearse with a young man with a cardboard sign around his neck that said andy on it. He was a lovely young man but the chemistry wasn’t the same.”

How were Kaufman and Reubens alike? Were they alike? “Kindness,” Kane said, “is something they had in common.” Giving people delight is a very generous act. See Andy’s wide-eyed boy-at-the-carnival glee when he’s chatting with Orson Welles on The Merv Griffin Show. He was a goofy kid from Great Neck, and now he’s talking with a legend as if he were talking to his grandpa. There’s footage of him, toward the end of his life, greeting a happy crowd at the Improv in Los Angeles. He’s the cheeriest person you’ve ever seen in a punk leather jacket and a Travis Bickle Mohawk. (And probably the only person whose Mohawk was concocted from post-chemotherapy hair.)

In the heartrending audio that concludes Wolf’s film, recorded by himself the day before he died, Reubens declares that his work as Pee-wee was “based in love and glee.” Kane said, “Paul was one of the sweetest people on the face of the earth.” The sweetest moment in Wolf’s documentary comes when we see Reubens as Pee-wee at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. “Rave response” would be an understatement of the audience’s reaction. He tries to goof with the crowd, telling them again and again, “Shut up! Stop!,” but the roar keeps coming. An expression moves across his face that isn’t an especially Pee-wee one: he’s touched, as if he’d just stumbled into a huge surprise party being thrown in his honor. But he recovers and asks, in that trademark whine, “Heard any good jokes lately?”

Kane told me her two old friends “were magical, both of them, in different ways.” Different brands of magic; similar kinds of spells. They conjured up wild new spaces to perform inside where things were multicolored, discombobulating, hysterical. Just like in the theme tune for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, “you’ve landed in a place where anything can happen,” and you can make it into your home. Magical indeed.

Charlie Fox is a writer and artist who lives in London. His book of essays, This Young Monster, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. He curated Flowers of Romance for Lodovico Corsini in 2024.