Further thoughts on Pee-Wee Herman

3 days ago I posted some videos of Pee-Wee Her­man, and I have been think­ing about his character.

The name Pee-Wee is not with­out impor­tance. The name Pee-Wee sup­ports his child­like char­ac­ter.  He is small, and harm­less.  Such youth­ful behav­ior makes him non-threatening, so the audi­ence indulges his behav­ior as they would a child.  The silent film star Harry Lang­don had a sim­i­lar quality.

In the wrestling video, Pee-Wee gets in the ring with a buffed out pro-wrestler and plays out his schtick.  But the wrestler can only get in his face.  If the wrestler were to knock him down, it would be like hit­ting a child.  He would be pick­ing on some­one half his weight.  When Pee-Wee mocks the wrestler, we enjoy his fear­less­ness.  We would love to say such things to the guy, but we don’t have the nerve.  It is one of the clown’s age old priv­eleges, to ridicule the pow­er­ful, to say the things we won’t.

One of the basic con­cepts of the clown is to not fol­low the rules of edu­cated soci­ety. Chil­dren don’t fol­low the rules of soci­ety sim­ply because they have not learned them yet. It gives them a license for such behav­ior, and is one of the ways to begin the cre­ation of a funny character.