{"id":171061,"date":"2025-06-16T12:32:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T16:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171061"},"modified":"2025-06-16T12:32:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T16:32:04","slug":"everything-is-enchanted-andy-kaufman-and-paul-reubens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/06\/16\/everything-is-enchanted-andy-kaufman-and-paul-reubens\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEverything is Enchanted\u201d: Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Left: Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas in Taxi<\/em>, 1979. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.<\/a> Right: Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, 2009. AP Photo\/Danny Moloshok.<\/p><\/div>\n

Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens both appeared on the hit TV show The Dating Game<\/em>, 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\u2019t him, not exactly. He had shown up as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character, Latka Gravas, whom he would soon make famous on NBC\u2019s show Taxi<\/em> (1979\u20131983. But no one knew who that was yet. On the show, it all got pretty discombobulating. He was grinning like a boy who\u2019d just discovered what fire could do to his Action Man; he deliberately misunderstood the jokes, and squealed \u201cI won!\u201d when he didn\u2019t win, all somehow earning him the gleeful indulgence of the studio audience. What the hell was that?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 <\/em>wasn\u2019t some sort of elaborate scheme Andy and Paul hatched together, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s Pee-wee as Himself<\/em> and Alex Braverman\u2019s wacked-out portrait of Kaufman, Thank You Very Much<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Personally, I like to imagine a documentary about both of them. Or a great buddy movie, maybe with Nicolas Cage as Andy and Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as Paul. Two Inscrutable Jews! <\/em>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<\/em> Howdy Doody Show<\/em>, I Love Lucy<\/em>, The Little Rascals<\/em>. Kaufman, the Philip Roth\u2013level satyr with a sweet tooth (\u201cHe was kind of a sex addict,\u201d his former partner Lynne Margulies cheerily remembers in the documentary); and Reubens, the willowy boy who dressed up as a princess on Halloween.<\/p>\n

In a 2009 chat with Reubens for Interview<\/em> magazine, Paul Rudd observed the Kaufman-esque vibe of that Dating Game<\/em>\u00a0appearance and wondered whether he was an influence. \u201cI was very influenced by him. I liked his work, and I knew him a tiny, teeny bit,\u201d Reubens said. I couldn\u2019t find any quotes of Kaufman talking about his contemporaries. That wasn\u2019t really his style.<\/p>\n

But among other things, Andy Kaufman may have been the architect of Reubens\u2019s Saturday morning TV masterpiece, Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/em>. Kaufman made a six-minute skit called \u201cUncle Andy\u2019s Funhouse\u201d for the TV show Buckshot<\/em> in 1980. Kaufman\u2019s best friend and coconspirator, Bob Zmuda\u2014a man who used to run around the Central Park Zoo with Kaufman, screaming, \u201cThe lion\u2019s out!\u201d\u2014once called it \u201ca kids\u2019 show for adults\u201d 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 \u201chouses\u201d that are alike in their eccentricity but it may be the only contest where Kaufman comes out looking slightly more \u201cnormal\u201d: he runs upstairs in a hula skirt to yell at his parents (actors); Pee-wee chats with a talking globe. They\u2019ve both disappeared into characters that seem to have beginnings and no ends.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Inscrutability can be a performer\u2019s best friend\u2014it makes everything more real and unpredictable\u2014but Kaufman\u2019s and Reubens\u2019s careers also offer lessons in its potential risks and pitfalls. In the interviews with Matt Wolf that make up Pee-wee as Himself<\/em>, combined with thousands of hours of material from Reubens\u2019s personal archive, Reubens comes off as, yes, a total sweetheart and a congenital mischief-maker, teasing and bedeviling Wolf at every turn. It\u2019s wild fun to watch, but you also know he\u2019s 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 \u201clost [his] entire personality by being involved with someone else,\u201d he swore off any long-term romantic relationship, dedicating himself to his career. His famous creation materialized not long after, partially shaped by Brown\u2019s mischievous spirit. But Reubens was in love and ached from the loss. He\u2019s close to tears when recalling Guy\u2019s death from AIDS<\/small>-related illness four decades earlier.<\/p>\n

Reubens also admits he\u2019s quite the control freak, and secretive as a Cold War spy. \u201cI\u2019m not a trusting person,\u201d he tells the director, straightforwardly. Fathoming the reasons for this isn\u2019t exactly rocket science. \u201cMy career,\u201d Reubens observes, \u201cwould have absolutely suffered if I was openly gay.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Maybe Reubens is sometimes coy because he\u2019s 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 (\u201cI was using my imagination. I was being creative. You can do it at home, too\u201d), cackle with glee, or yell a snotty playground insult: \u201cAct your age, not your IQ!\u201d 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<\/em> (1982).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmermaid version of Cher\u201d in a trippy video long before Cher appeared in a movie called Mermaids<\/em> (1990). In Super 8 footage of Reubens as a stoned sylph wreathed in sequins and fur, experimenting with various drag looks, it\u2019s giving Rrose S\u00e9lavy via Peter Hujar. He referred to his Pee-wee act as \u201cperformance art\u201d plenty of times.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the matter of his two arrests: the first for public exposure in a Florida porno theater while Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s documentary includes footage of Connie Chung referring to Herman\u2019s<\/em> 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, \u201cFame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst?\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, Zmuda says, \u201cIt was like working for Harry Houdini. They weren\u2019t jokes, they were illusions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaufman was a great actor: fearless, able to convince you he really meant whatever he did. And yet he didn\u2019t seem interested in playing anybody that didn\u2019t come out of his head. But that\u2019s a flaw only if you\u2019re interested in the usual way of doing things. It\u2019s fun to imagine Kaufman doing what Reubens did in Blow<\/em> (2001), for example, and giving a sly and sensitive performance as a campy, drug-trafficking hairdresser. But maybe he would\u2019ve shown up as somebody who wasn\u2019t even in the script, just for fun. Why does the performance have to stop \u201chere\u201d rather than \u201cthere\u201d? And decided that, anyway?<\/p>\n

If Kaufman felt that what he was up to was performance art, of course, he wasn\u2019t telling. There\u2019s no record of him talking about Fluxus; there\u2019s just his friend Laurie Anderson in Thank You Very Much<\/em> 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\u2019d 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\u2019s account, in her book Was This Man a Genius? Talks with Andy Kaufman<\/em> (2001), of trying to profile him for Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em> 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 ma\u00eetre d\u2019 they have a reservation, but in the voice of a fusty aristocrat.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI\u2019m very sorry but I just phoned and was told I would be served if I arrived before one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is almost one now,\u201d said the ma\u00eetre d\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sir Andrew of Kaufmanshire retorts in his faux-British accent, \u201cAlmost\u2014but not yet one.\u201d Dinner is served. Robin Williams noted on the 1995 TV special A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman<\/em>, \u201cAndy made himself the premise, and the world was the punch line.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Does anybody else feel high? Perhaps it isn\u2019t a surprise to learn that Reubens and many members of the production design team on Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/em> 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\u2019s punk artists, Gary Panter. Pee-wee is talking to a hot Black cowboy who was in Apocalypse Now<\/em>. (Laurence Fishburne!) Ah, the walls are melting. Is Chairry a mint-green talking chair or a mint-green talking hippo? Every episode\u2019s secret word makes the whole set explode (\u201cFun!\u201d), just like when you and your pals get tickled into Jell-O by a stoner in-joke.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, led astray by too much On The Road<\/em> 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\u2019ve spooked Dennis Hopper. LSD, DMT, STP, Dexedrine, rivers of booze \u201cevery day!\u201d as he recalled in an interview. \u201cEvery day!\u201d 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 \u201ctoxic.\u201d (Except when he was being his lounge singer alter ego, Tony Clifton, bellowing like a hungover sea lion\u2014then it was time for cigarettes and whiskey.)<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWhat exactly is a joke?\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em> (1986). The Norman Rockwell suburbs seething with psychosexual nightmares in Blue Velvet<\/em> (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<\/em> 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<\/em>: \u201cHere I come to save the day!\u201d Or see the touching spectacle of Kaufman talking with Howdy Doody on his 1977 special Andy\u2019s Funhouse<\/em>, as if the puppet were a real person: \u201cThe first friend I ever had.\u201d If they make you feel like you\u2019re zonked on psychedelics, it\u2019s partly because they crack open a portal to a certain childlike wonder. It\u2019s a world in which, as Glenn O\u2019Brien pointed out in his epic exegesis on Pee-wee for Artforum<\/em>, \u201ceverything is enchanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

As soon CBS gave Reubens the green light, he was on a mission. He tells Wolf that he knew at once that \u201cI can be the beacon of being like, It\u2019s okay to be different<\/em>.\u201d 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 \u201cthere was<\/em> gay subtext in Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/em>,\u201d he can barely hide his mirth: a big reveal of the most obvious thing in the world. Who\u2019s that knocking at the cherry-red door at the height of the ultrahomophobic Reagan era? A who\u2019s who of LGBTQ royalty: Cher! Grace Jones! Little Richard! And that\u2019s just the Christmas special. It was kind of radical, given that the president didn\u2019t even say the word AIDS<\/em><\/small> until 1985.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> meant that. He got himself voted off SNL <\/em>for being so infuriating. Imagine somebody today publicly seeming to turn their comedy career into a side hustle while they become the \u201cInter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the United States,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Everybody\u2019s 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<\/em> Last of the Mohicans<\/em>. You\u2019re falling fall through a whole other trap door when you remember that Kaufman caused all this trouble as \u201cAndy Kaufman.\u201d It\u2019s 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 \u201cThe King\u201d Lawler during a wrestling match and bundled off to the hospital, the cast of Taxi <\/em>\u201cthought 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\u2014it was fake!\u201d<\/p>\n

Some people still think Andy Kaufman isn\u2019t dead. He\u2019s been sighted, among other places, at a Walmart in New Mexico. Zmuda cryptically suggests that \u201cif he wasn\u2019t dead, he\u2019d be faking his death.\u201d Is he secretly watching Nathan Fielder\u2019s reality-mangling antics on The Rehearsal <\/em>and giggling with approval? Why did he work as a busboy while he was on Taxi<\/em>? He was like some mythological creature that exists just to bewilder people and bask in their responses.<\/p>\n

Underneath all the chaos, there may have been peace, maintained by a deep internal purpose. Thank You Very Much<\/em> 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\u2019s Elvis, a wrestler, or somebody who screams \u201cYou\u2019ll Never Walk Alone\u201d while thrashing a hi-hat on The Mike Douglas Show<\/em>. Forty thousand dollars is only a financial loss; it doesn\u2019t mean real failure. Accept good or bad reactions as beautiful in their own way. \u201cLet be be finale of seem,\u201d in the words of Wallace Stevens, but in front of a live studio audience, ideally. \u201cHe was so courageous,\u201d Kane told me, \u201cbecause 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I called Kane, the sui generis Upper West Side Good Witch from such classics as Scrooged<\/em> (1988), Carnal Knowledge <\/em>(1971), and Addams Family Values<\/em> (1993). She knew them both. She acted with Kaufman as Latka\u2019s girlfriend, Simka, on Taxi<\/em>, 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. \u201cPaul arranged it all,\u201d she said. \u201cHe did it very elegantly.\u201d Happily recalling Kaufman, she said, \u201cHe 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\u2019t the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

How were Kaufman and Reubens alike? Were they alike? \u201cKindness,\u201d Kane said, \u201cis something they had in common.\u201d Giving people delight is a very generous act. See Andy\u2019s wide-eyed boy-at-the-carnival glee when he\u2019s chatting with Orson Welles on The Merv Griffin Show<\/em>. He was a goofy kid from Great Neck, and now he\u2019s talking with a legend as if he were talking to his grandpa. There\u2019s footage of him, toward the end of his life, greeting a happy crowd at the Improv in Los Angeles. He\u2019s the cheeriest person you\u2019ve 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.)<\/p>\n

In the heartrending audio that concludes Wolf\u2019s film, recorded by himself the day before he died, Reubens declares that his work as Pee-wee was \u201cbased in love and glee.\u201d Kane said, \u201cPaul was one of the sweetest people on the face of the earth.\u201d The sweetest moment in Wolf\u2019s documentary comes when we see Reubens as Pee-wee at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. \u201cRave response\u201d would be an understatement of the audience\u2019s reaction. He tries to goof with the crowd, telling them again and again, \u201cShut up! Stop!,\u201d but the roar keeps coming. An expression moves across his face that isn\u2019t an especially Pee-wee one: he\u2019s touched, as if he\u2019d just stumbled into a huge surprise party being thrown in his honor. But he recovers and asks, in that trademark whine, \u201cHeard any good jokes lately?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kane told me her two old friends \u201cwere magical, both of them, in different ways.\u201d 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\u2019s Playhouse<\/em>, \u201cyou\u2019ve landed in a place where anything can happen,\u201d and you can make it into your home. Magical indeed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Charlie Fox is a writer and artist who lives in London. His book of essays,<\/em> This Young Monster, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. He curated<\/em> Flowers of Romance for Lodovico Corsini in 2024.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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