Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too.

I wonder if people who only knew of Pee-wee Herman as an established icon understand what a disruptive force the he was at the time. If Pee-wee’s Big Adventure has always been basic cable comfort food and Pee-wee’s Playhouse has similarly been locked into the canon of great, bygone television for you, is it even possible to appreciate what it was like when Paul Reubens careened onto stages and television screens in a too-tight suit and shock-red bow tie radiating childlike manic energy that was so ironic that it circled back to sincerity? Reubens was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings when he created Pee-wee Herman, and it wasn’t long after that he realized the character’s potential as an ongoing persona maintaining so diligently that it became performance art. As a work of comedy, it was akin to Andy Kaufman’s immersive artistry but informed by joyful innocence rather than simmering hostility. Pee-wee arrived on talk shows like a seismic blast.

There were few better showcases for Reubens’s ongoing creation during the nineteen-eighties than Late Night with David Letterman. In that earliest era of Letterman’s long reign in television that aired around midnight, producers and bookers knew that unsettling the host on air was a comedy diamond mine. Pee-wee’s anarchic spirit pushed against Letterman’s Midwestern staidness marvelously. Every one of the many segments that brought Reubens into that studio was a bright explosion of inspiration. I watched most of them on the night they originally aired, and I can attest that each of them felt furiously revolutionary.

The appearance the crack team at the Letterman YouTube account posted today has a fleeting moment that reveals the veiled breadth of Reubens’s acting. When he briefly switches to an impression of his neighbor Moses, who people call Moe, Reubens dips into a strikingly different characterization that conveys a whole identity in a couple moments. For a split second, it almost seems like Reubens could pivot permanently to this other ongoing role for the rest of his career if he wanted to, and it would be just as compelling and convincing.

Genius manifests many ways. This is one of them.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Laughing Matters” tag.