1. The Playhouse

Objects to Love

Returning to Pee-wee’s Playhouse as an adult media historian (instead of a gay eight-year-old), I realized for the first time that Pee-wee doesn’t actually live in the playhouse, though he does receive mail there. In season one, before the set expands to include bunk beds, Pee-wee arrives each morning and leaves at the end of each workday, like playing is his vocation. He wears a uniform: a shrunken grey suit, a red bow tie, and white leather loafers with tassels: a gonzo, futuristic Mr. Rogers who looks nothing like anyone’s grandpa.

I think of the real house used to shoot the film Pee-wee’ Big Adventure (1985) as Pee-wee’s actual house, where he sleeps. It’s in South Pasadena around the corner from the Trader Joe’s I used to shop at when I lived in nearby Highland Park. Watching Pee-wee as an adult, I imagine that his playhouse is a short commute away, in the part of Altadena that butts up against the Angeles Forest mountains hemming in the basin that is Los Angeles. It’s located down some dusty fire road, tucked into the brush. The opening of each episode supports this, as the camera floats up through dry, definitely California mountains to the playhouse exterior, perched on a small cliff. At the end of each episode, Pee-wee hurtles out of the playhouse garage door on his scooter. He careens past cactuses through semiarid desert, and then along the Northern California coastline, shot from the 101, down to what I think is the 210 that skirts across the top of L.A. This tour through three distinct biomes is all California, and so is the playhouse’s blend of 1980s Memphis Milan design with kitschy 1950s and ’60s Americana. The interior is covered floor to ceiling in clashing, patterned wallpaper, abstracted color blocks, loud furnishings, and hard geometric angles, and packed with objects of a discerning but prolific thrift store collector.

The action of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse revolves around Pee-wee doing regular and also wacky things in his home alongside its inhabitants: he makes meals, receives visitors, plays with his computational friends, bounces on his cushy, upholstered armchair Chairy, and interacts with household appliances such as the wall clock Clocky and a refrigerator filled with singing and dancing claymation foods. Nearly everything in the playhouse is animate and has a personality. The house and the things inside it matter as much as Pee-wee’s persona and the storylines shaping each episode. To emphasize this even playing field, Reubens asked the show’s writers to only call out the names of the nonhuman characters in the theme song, which was performed, uncredited, by Cindi Lauper.1 These nonhuman characters are all residents; the humans are visitors who enter the space temporarily to play.

The playhouse interior feels like it doesn’t belong neatly to any one era, nor do the future technologies inside. Conky, Magic Screen, Globey, and Picture Phone also evoke California counterculture, in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog and a more experimental 1960s Silicon Valley. They are electronic “tools” that promise openings onto other worlds and ways of being but are much queerer in the human–machine relations they propose:

• Conky is a first-grader’s boxy drawing of a robot made from electronic trash in some genius tinkerer’s lab: their face is a typewriter with two camera flashbulbs for ears; their chest is a 1980s boom box; their bottom half is a record player turned on its side; their right hand appears to be a straightening iron for flattening hair. Conky’s arms are made of plastic accordion tubing used in HVAC applications, and they roll around on industrial castors. The overall vibe is of a Halloween costume created by a talented parent who went a little wild at Home Depot. Conky speaks in a stuttering, computerized emulation of a human voice, similar to the clunky text-to-speech voices of that era. Conky’s full name is “Conky 2000,” juxtaposing millennial ideas of technological progress with the frustrated feeling of a printer or computer “conking out.” Conky’s primary responsibility on the show is generating each episode’s Secret Word, spitting it out on a piece of receipt paper and stuttering, “Today’s secret word is . . .” Whenever the word is uttered by anyone else on the show, the entire cast, and viewers at home, are supposed to scream gleefully at the top of their lungs.
• Magic Screen looks like an Etch-A-Sketch mounted on a rolling easel but works like an iPad. They have googly eyes, a smiling mouth that’s also a small keyboard, and a face made of a CRT screen. Their hands are attached to obscenely long, articulated arms, assembled from multiple strips of wood joined together with wing nuts. Magic Screen looks up information when asked, using these hands to manipulate their own touchscreen face. Pee-wee can jump in and out of Magic Screen, entering a digital world where he’s fully immersed in games like Connect the Dots. When Pee-wee jumps inside Magic Screen to connect the dots, he sings to himself in monotone, “connect the dots, la la la, connect the dots, la la la” on repeat until the puzzle is finished. Usually, he’s managed to draw a vehicle or some other interactive thing that comes to life once complete. These computer-animated sequences seemed high-tech in the late 1980s and were part of the reason the show’s budget far exceeded most Saturday morning children’s television.
• Globey is made of high-density puppeteer’s foam sculpted and painted to look like a globe. Pee-wee relies on Globey for information retrieval about geography, history, and general-interest questions. They talk in an ambiguously accented lilt and have a dry sense of humor. Globey’s face is human-looking, blue like the ocean, and includes eyebrows made from the same, bright-green astroturf material as their continents. Long plush arms end in Mickey Mouse–style gloved white hands. Globey was a remote-controlled puppet who could zip around the playhouse floor on concealed wheels, and spin in circles on a base like a proper globe. Puppeteer George McGrath describes how Globey’s mechanics had a mind of their own, and the puppet often malfunctioned, spinning around wildly without any input from the remote control.2
• Picture Phone looks like a tricked-out instant photo booth at the mall but dressed as a high-femme punk. Pee-wee walks past Picture Phone’s long, blonde, jute-rope hair and through their face to enter the booth. He ducks under fake eyelashes and pulls open oversized, lipstick-red lips that create a gate across the booth’s entryway. Pee-wee sits inside the booth, which is upholstered in giraffe-print fun fur, and pulls down a thematic background screen that changes from episode to episode. The booth is for live video calls, made using a tin-can receiver of discarded “fruit cocktail” and a CRT television screen.

Pee-wee is in kinship with these technologies in ways that are about love, attachment, and reciprocity but not romance or sex. Children love and learn from repetition and Pee-wee repeats bits from episode to episode as a strategy for relating to the audience and the others in the playhouse. He jokes most often in the register of the non sequitur, uttered in his iconic, silly voice. Pee-wee’s most frequent retort, “I know you are, but what am I?” is case in point. These weren’t just words—the phrase had a specific cadence, tone, and rhythm, like a lyric from a song. Kids who picked it up as a new schoolyard refrain were nearly singing their refusal of an insult’s terms, followed by a ping-pong back onto the other: I am not that, but what else might I be, to you?

I’m more interested in a different Pee-wee classic: “I love [insert object] but I’m not going to marry it.” In the premiere episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, after introducing the viewer to Conky, Magic Screen, Globey, and a collection of his smaller toys, Pee-wee tells the camera, “I love my toys. I’m not gonna marry them though.”3 Here Pee-wee marks the computational characters and toys as not quite human, and his love of them as not a romantic love. This does not lessen that love, because Pee-wee is not interested in or fit for marriage, though he does, in one memorable scene, marry a fruit salad because he loves it that much.4

The bit begins when Pee-wee, eating fruit salad at a pajama party picnic on the playhouse floor, says wistfully, “I love fruit salad.” A chorus of other characters chime in with “then why don’t you marry it?” Pee-wee looks straight into the camera in close-up, calling the bluff like a true brat: “Alright then, I will, ha ha.” Cut to the wedding. The fruit salad wears a plastic bowl and a wedding veil while Pee-wee is still in his pajamas. The puppet flowers in the playhouse’s window box sing the wedding march, swaying slowly, and Ricardo, the buff, Spanish-speaking soccer player who replaced lifeguard Tito in season 2, officiates the wedding. Pee-wee and the fruit salad seem smitten. Pee-wee gazes into the salad as if it has eyes as he says, “I do,” and they kiss to seal the deal. This is a moment from the show that writer George McGrath singles out as Pee-wee “expressing a whole different sexuality” (other than gay or straight), which was part of Reubens’s eagerness to “flip expectations.”5

Queer Studies in the Playhouse

Pee-wee’s dalliances with the objects and electronic characters in his home happen against the backdrop of a larger world of topsy-turvy gender and sexuality characterizing the show. In the late 1980s, a brief explosion of television studies scholarship took up Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Reubens’s character as essential postmodern experiments with gender and sexuality. The show was ripe with shifting signifiers, imbued with the power to critique 1980s Reaganism and the rugged, autonomous masculinity it used to shore up neoliberal economic policies.6 Media studies scholar Charles Acland argued that the show’s many gendered possibilities, including the nonhuman characters’ often “wild gender markings,” produce “the joy of being lost in the labyrinth of gender excess.”7 Queer studies scholar Alexander Doty read the character as the ultimate 1950s sissy boy, recast through the camp aesthetics of effeminate 1980s gay men to construct a “closeted yet richly queer-connotative time-warp.”8 In many ways, this text was perfect for experimenting with what emerging queer theory and feminist deconstructive techniques could do with a not-so-scholarly object and showcased the willingness of young scholars in this field to be unabashed about taking seriously what Lauren Berlant has called “silly” archives, made up of low-brow, small, antimonumental objects and scenes used to conjure counterpolitics and theories that matter.9 Pee-wee scholars, riding a queer poststructural wave in media studies, could take up the playhouse seriously and still have tenure-track jobs.

When this early Pee-wee scholarship brought up how race works in the playhouse, it was to note that racial diversity exists in uncomplicated ways in Pee-wee’s world, an anomaly on 1980s television; there are white, Black, and Latine characters who get to just be people (i.e. Cowboy Curtis, played by a young Laurence Fishburne).10 An exception is Doty’s brief critique of Tito the lifeguard, Cowboy Curtis, and Ricardo the soccer player as erotically displayed examples of butch exoticism: forbidden “ethnic” objects of Pee-wee’s closeted desire.11 The show’s ensemble of child characters who often come over to play with Pee-wee includes Cher (Diane Yang), an Asian girl of about nine who wears an outfit that is a kitschy, 1960s hippie appropriation of pan-Indigenous femininity. This was perhaps a dig at Cher, the singer and gay icon who has falsely claimed Cherokee ancestry and often appeared in this type of clothing and performed in war bonnets in the 1970s. For film scholar Constance Penley, child Cher’s costume was part of a campy but ultimately politically productive display of difference.12 It’s impossible to read Cher as anything other than cultural appropriation now. Cultural television studies in the 1980s asked Pee-wee to do heavy social critique with his fey body and collection of marvelous objects. Like much early white queer studies, this work celebrated subversive takes on gender and sexuality in ways that foreclosed attention to racial difference and coloniality, and ignored the role that white gay culture can play in upholding these oppressive systems.

More than three decades later, queer studies is better grounded in questions of affect and materiality and attuned to the raced dimensions of care and play. Film scholar Florent Christol, writing on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (dir. Tim Burton), the 1985 feature film that led to the television show, argues that racial hierarchies structure Pee-wee’s relationship to his toys: “Although they seem to exist only in the escapist world of childhood games and fantasy, the freakish toys/puppets/effigies littering Pee-wee’s bedroom are, in fact, related to ideas of racial hierarchy typical of a colonial, imperialist ideology.”13 Perhaps a cabinet of curiosities can never be divorced from the colonial impulse to collect, categorize, and display exotic forms of difference. Conky, Magic Screen, Globey, and Picture Phone are electronic characters bordering on devices, who do things for Pee-wee in a 1950s interior: they look up information he requests, connect his phone calls, and keep him company. In this sense, they reference early electronic appliances marketed to white suburban women in the 1950s as “electric servants,” strategically invoking the anti-Black legacies of slavery in the Jim Crow era.14 The difference here is that the playhouse inhabitants are not labor-saving; their “work” is more like experimental play, and their mutual relationships with Pee-wee invite sarcasm and disagreement. Pee-wee lives in his own weird world, but he also lives in the world, shaped by racial capital as it structures domestic space and the hierarchies between humans, objects, and humans-who-are-considered-objects because they are domestic servants.15

The animate devices in Pee-wee’s home are nonhuman characters: they have life, but can be turned off, unplugged. Their personalities are deliberately robotic, especially Conky, whose stuttered speech and movement emphasize the gaps between authentic human affect and 1980s visions of artificial intelligence. For Acland, the “half-lives” of these “anthropomorphic” characters is part of what makes them available for embodying a subversive critique of gender binaries as artificial.16 Though these computational characters are not explicitly racialized, their low levels of animacy compared to the show’s human characters evoke latent racial hierarchies. In Animacies, queer and disability studies scholar Mel Chen shows how some things seem more or less alive than others in a hierarchy of meaning and value that manifests racial difference: plants seem more animate than metal, people seem more animate than plants; whiteness seems more animate than Asianness or Blackness.17 Conky, Magic Screen, Globey, and Picture Phone exist alongside racialized characters like Cher and Jambi (John Paragon), the extremely gay and exoticized turban-wearing genie, whose disembodied head Pee-wee keeps in a box and consults when he wants to make a wish. Even as Pee-wee is in kinship with his toys and electronic friends, his animacy is paramount over theirs, and so the relations between them can never be entirely mutual.

I’m not trying to rescue Pee-wee’s Playhouse by returning the human–machine dynamics inside the house to innocence or to resuscitate the casual racism of 1980s children’s television with posthumanism. But there are aspects of this “smart home” that are odder and less guaranteed than these important critiques can fully account for. Following disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim’s analysis of the radical passivity of sex dolls who are nonetheless kin in films such as Lars and the Real Girl, objects in the playhouse generate different kinds of meanings, affects, and social recognitions.18 Lars (Ryan Gosling) is a painfully shy, potentially neurodivergent, single man in his thirties who lives in a small town and buys a blow-up sex doll to be his girlfriend, animating her with a personality and life story. The rest of the town plays along to support Lars. For Kim, the radical passivity and repose of Lars’s sex doll, and the ways the town steps in to animate her, are entries to rethinking relations with objects, personhood, and able-bodiedness. Like Lars, who loves a plastic doll, Pee-wee’s unusual sexuality and gender factor here. He is neither boy or man; he is a sissy, queerly asexual; and his domestic life does not serve hetero-reproductive ends.

Thinking alongside the new understandings of object-being and reciprocity with technology that emerge through Pee-wee’s relations, we might ask what happens when a smart home is wired with devices who don’t just talk back, like Siri, Alexa, or ChatGPT, but engage in a mutually determined, tiny queer world together? Looking back at how Pee-wee’s Playhouse manifested a vision of living intimately and interactively with technologies lets us sit more angrily with the actual AI the tech industry is offering us: these technologies surveil, measure, and average our bodies, and lie about how their “generative” functions can replace our imaginations and intuitions. Conky could probably write an essay for you, but he has better things to do. The screaming catharsis generated by the secret words Conky creates press on the paucity of actually existing generative AI: the ways AI-generated writing is bad but also makes learning, writing, and reading boring.

Crucially, the playhouse technologies are all puppets, each operated by a concealed human actor who is either perched above the set in rafters pulling strings, squeezed inside a large puppet, hiding behind a wall with their hand shoved inside a foam back, or standing off-stage operating a remote control. To lend a feeling of vitality and liveness to production, the playhouse puppets were all voiced live, the actors mic’d on set, with very little postproduction voice-over. For the actors on the show, this meant dynamic interaction that translates into a feeling of authentic reciprocity for viewers, which is also present in shows like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. While Conky, Magic Screen, Picture Phone, and Globey were all computational, the scrappy, low-fi construction making up their puppet-ness gives them warmth and life.

Still, Pee-wee can’t marry his toys because Pee-wee can’t marry anyone: he is a boy in the show, and Reubens was rumored to be gay in real life, and this combination opens Pee-wee to different entanglements. Pee-wee loves the stuff that lives in his house, as objects to think and play with, but he is not quite interested in shacking up, sharing a life. Neither are the objects and toys because they’re objects and toys. Yet, Pee-wee loves them and the ways they bring him safely outside the playhouse into a wider network. To explore these relationships, Pee-wee blends unusual nonanthropocentric intimacies with an over-the-top style of play open to new encounters made possible by these living machines.

Playing Inside

Pee-wee played hard and fast in ways no one had seen on live-action children’s television before, so much so that the show is writer Tom Engelhardt’s central example in his 1991 article coining the term “screen time.” Here, Pee-wee’s “bizarrely hyperactive” embodiment is used to characterize a precipitous quickening of children’s media cultures that threatened to change behavior beyond the screen.19 Mr. Rogers and Mr. Dressup also invited the audience into their homes to play with toys and puppets, but had deliberately gentle, slow-as-molasses styles of calm engagement. Moral panics about screens aside, more so than any other children’s television show I have seen, Pee-wee’s Playhouse was designed to facilitate playing along with the television.

To study this para-play, media scholar Henry Jenkins set up a viewing party for five kindergarteners in his apartment, a methodology that is even more terrifying than statistical regression to this childless homosexual. For Jenkins, the show inspires frenetic, unstructured, experimental play, a phenomenon he describes as “going bonkers.”20 He writes, “Pee-wee invites us to enter the anarchic realm where desire and disorder are indistinguishable and where infantile urges are given free reign.”21 Play can be messy, destructive, ambiguous, a productive transgression with the world and its boundaries, but it can also be a source of social anxiety when children perceive that there is a right way to play.22 Play with technology in particular is often overdetermined by play scripts because of the association between digital technologies and future careers.23 Adults, who made up one-third of the Pee-wee’s Playhouse audience, don’t often get to play in the wild, unstructured ways signaled by “going bonkers,” and so watching a queer adult in a boy’s suit delight in play can feel liberatory.

Queer video games scholar Bo Ruberg looks to play as potential brought to games by players.24 Play is queer when it is ungoverned by the rules or apparent formal limitations of a game or other structure for play. Queer play can include playing to lose, playing too fast or too slow, playing the wrong way, and it’s probably safe to say, “going bonkers.” For Ruberg, the queer subject is defined, in a basic sense, by the drive to play and the practice of playing differently. We know Pee-wee is queer, in part because of the ways he plays against the rules of most domestic spaces: jumping on his furniture, screaming, marrying fruit salad. Queer play isn’t just for fun, rather, “[it] resists and repurposes games for alternative desires; it upends the normative logics that structure the game and transform it into a space for testing the boundaries of pleasure, identity, and agency.”25 Pee-wee’s whole environment is a set of structures and routines to be tested and exploded through play. As Jenkins writes, “Many of Pee-wee’s Playhouse’s most appealing segments deal with the disruption of domestic space.”26 A smart home environment is normally designed for efficiency, calm, and frictionless use of tools to carry out everyday tasks. The playhouse is “unruly, disorderly, and cluttered” and “nothing is in its proper place, either literally or figuratively.”27 Pee-wee understands his wired house as a space for wild, intersubjective play—he arrives each morning to be in kinship, and to better know the world and himself by making a mess with others.

Early in each episode, Pee-wee turns Conky on by unplugging them, retracting a black electrical cord into Conky’s body, like a vacuum cleaner. Conky has been charging overnight, waiting for Pee-wee’s arrival. Conky powers up through a series of stuttered movements and digital sounds, which Pee-wee often emulates as he waits for the machine to boot up. “Ready to assist you Pee-wee,” Conky says in a robotic voice. “Good morning Conky! What’s today’s secret word?” Pee-wee asks. Conky’s boom-box chest prints a strip of paper, and Pee-wee tears it off like a receipt or ticker tape. Conky tells the audience the secret word of the day—it’s always a common word familiar to kids’ vocabularies, like “DOOR” or “GOOD”—while Pee-wee holds the paper up to the camera. Pee-wee explains, “You all know what to do for the rest of the day. When anyone says the secret word, scream real loud, okay?” The secret word sets off a routine where joy erupts into the playhouse and the viewers’ living room at odd intervals through the rest of the episode as the word is “accidently” uttered. This exchange celebrates the structure of a secret kept by playhouse residents to surprise visitors. Secret-keeping is a reminder of the closet but also evokes the warmth and solidarity of gossip and in-jokes to those on the margins of power. Reba the mail lady takes particular delight in finding ways to uncover and then say the secret word when she drops off the mail. Conky is an odd machine performing iterative, proto–natural language processing—when a computer tries to parse human speech and interpret sentiment. But Conky’s purpose is not digesting words and phrases as data; rather, he facilitates cathartic, mutual chaos.

Picture Phone, a kinder, gentler Zoom, also brings Pee-wee into relation with others. Pee-wee lives in a world where everyone has a tin-can video phone, so there are always new people to call, many of whom send the show careening in new directions. Picture Phone is the least animate of the four computational characters I’ve highlighted—they have no dialog or voice and cannot move from their place in the house. And yet they are stylized in a vernacular that reads immediately as high femme to queer adult viewers: pin-up style makeup, long hair, and loud prints. In the show’s fifth season, we learn that Picture Phone is controlled remotely by a human switchboard operator named Rhonda, played by the 1980s queer icon Sandra Bernhard, in an episode ironically titled “Camping Out.”28

In this episode, Picture Phone rings, Pee-wee answers, and Rhonda says seductively, “Remember me?” Pee-wee responds, reluctantly, as if resisting her advances, “Uh, yeah. Hi Rhonda.” Pee-wee says the episode’s secret word, “SHOW,” and he and Rhonda scream. She says, breathily, “I just looooove that secret word.” Pee-wee replies, flatly, “then why don’t you marry it?” As the conversation continues, Rhonda’s voice and affect get more explicit, in an exaggerated imitation of the phone-sex hotline ads popular on late-night television at that time. Phone sex operators in the 1980s and ’90s expertly manipulated the telephone’s capacity for distanced, mediated intimacy through techniques like modulating their voices to be breathy.29 Rhonda offers, over and over again, to “connect” Pee-Wee, elongating the word with her lispy, affected speech. This joke is aimed at the show’s adult audience and has implications a child viewer can’t understand. Pee-wee acts deliberately obtuse to Rhonda’s seductions, because his asexual queerness makes the premise of mutual attraction impossible. The Picture Phone stresses that mediation is always a strategy for modulating connection so that we can bear it. Media theorist Hannah Zeavin calls this “distanced intimacy,” a practice of using media such as video calling to generate co-presence while also regulating emotional nearness.30 Pee-wee’s media keeps others close but at a distance, running interference with an outside world that won’t hold Pee-wee as the jobless, queerly asexual man-boy he’s free to be in the house.

Picture Phone and the other animate computational devices in the playhouse are Pee-wee’s only windows outside. Visitors to the Playhouse come and go every episode, but Pee-wee almost never leaves, unless it’s through a video call, or by jumping inside the Magic Screen, or by seeing other parts of the world as he interacts with Globey, the humanoid Geographic Information System (GIS). Pee-wee’s ways of being networked are fundamentally mediated by these personalities and the buffers they offer him and his weirdness. These computational characters also help Pee-wee with tasks that matter to him within the plotlines of the show, pursuing play as reciprocity. For example, Pee-wee, Picture Phone, Magic Screen, and Globey collaborate to help bring home their friend, the mariner Captain Carl (Phil Hartman), who is lost at sea, using video calling, search retrieval, and GIS. Play is a strategy for conviviality between humans and computational objects that presents a different set of historiographic possibilities for the smart home: as a place of experimentation and delight, rather than self-optimization, surveillance, and data exploitation.

Pee-wee Does Media History

Queer and trans histories of technology illustrate alternatives to the present, mapping genealogies beyond critique, records of what media historian Whit Pow calls “what-ifs, of outsides, of possibilities beyond the scope of what could be coded and anticipated.”31 This is how I think of Pee-wee’s playhouse: not as a prototypical smart home, the way a Vox article might narrate this media history, but as a vision of what being in everyday relation with network technologies queerly might have been like. Pee-wee loves the toys, as objects to think and play with, and live alongside, and he puts them to uses that are mutually determined, pursuing joy and play rather than algorithmic efficiencies. The playhouse is an otherwise media history; a different vision of the future, from the 1980s, that was never realized but that we might want to think along with.

Queer people think differently with old technologies. Sociologist Lindsey Freeman writes about a “fabulous perpetual motion machine” built in the mid-1800s and displayed at the Museum of Appalachia in the 1980s, when she was a queer kid growing up sideways and also watching Pee-wee Herman.32 The machine no longer worked, because parts were missing and no one knew how to fix it. Freeman writes, “A melancholy feeling settled over me when I read the panel explaining that the knowledge of how to make the wheels spin was lost to history. Jackson’s machine was simultaneously a provocation from the past and glimpse of a future that never arrived.”33 Feeling melancholy when sitting with broken, futuristic technologies from the past is part mourning (the machine is irreparable and so is the future it imagined) and part anticipation (someone in the past imagined something better than what we have now). Queer media studies scholar Jed Samer thinks similarly about the potentialities present in lesbian film, video, and science fiction, which present former futures that were never realized, that are indeed unrealizable, but generate ideas we “may want to imagine within the ongoing project of forging freer futures.”34 As potentiality, the playhouse is an otherworldly queer space that starts from a different set of assumptions about what a home is for and what technologies of the near future might enable.

This is how I think of Pee-wee’s playhouse: as a vision of what being in everyday relation with network technologies might have become but didn’t, and couldn’t, because it was neither profitable, efficient, or normal. This attitude toward technologies reflects Pee-wee’s Playhouse’s ethical message more generally, which was one of reciprocity. In episode after episode, the takeaway is that we build spaces that we want to live in with others, and that feel good, by thinking about what others need, what we can offer, and how our actions land. This was typical of some other children’s television in the 1980s (for example, Sesame Street), but takes on specific resonances about humans, media, and objects in the playhouse. Often this is a simple structure for an episode’s plotline, such as a formal dress-up party with a gift exchange between every single human and nonhuman character, where Pee-wee takes great care to make sure no one is left out.35

In this sense, Pee-wee’s Playhouse takes up an ethics of care in that it asks playhouse residents and visitors, and viewers at home, to grapple with how we might be in good relations with the other on mutually affirming terms.36 One way to think about care is through the vital forms of recognition and material support minoritized people give to each other within overwhelming negative atmospheres.37 Through forms of adjustment and mutual recognition, care ekes out ways of feeling better, or at least less terrible, in a world that is not designed to hold us.

Playhouse care ethics pushed against the 1980s turn toward privatization as a fundamental tactic of neoliberal economic policy where it met social ideas about the family, private property, and atomized individualism. Pee-wee’s home was a space that was open to all kinds of misfits, who were invited to play on and with the space, routines, and rituals of the home: here the inside becomes outside and the boundary between these concepts becomes blurrier. Because queer adults saw the show as a nonrepresentational example of queer content on television, playhouse care ethics were also anathema to the privatized and proper gay identity gaining traction in the late 1980s. This image of respectability would become cemented by the 1990s but was unattainable or felt like social death for those whose racial, classed, or disabled experiences, or simply their sexual interests, made ongoing interdependence with many others a political and material necessity. Finally, Pee-wee care ethics also push against 1980s ideas of children as in need of sanctuary within the locked-down, private home because of threats from nefarious outside forces: for example, overblown myths about needles in Halloween candy, heightened law-enforcement and media focus on child abduction and “stranger danger,” and conspiracy theories about satanic cults committing mass childhood sexual abuse.

Pee-wee is also engaged with critic and gender theorist Andrea Long Chu’s playful definition of ethics as commitment to a bit.38 Chu, who writes about the radical 1960s feminist Valerie Solanas as both hilarious and deadly serious, sees commitment to a bit as an ethics because it carefully locates the comic as one who does something like politics or critique by maintaining an affective register outside everyone else’s. Chu writes, “To commit to a bit is to play it straight—that is, to take it seriously. A bit may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real. . . . That’s what makes the bit funny: the fact that, for the comic, it isn’t.”39 Pee-wee knows that he is funny, or at least fun, but he never betrays Globey and the others as puppets or even as merely machines: they are marvelous objects with whom he builds a world inside.

Reubens’s commitment to the bit that is Pee-wee Herman was extreme—he only appeared in public as Pee-wee, never as himself, and gave all his interviews in character, blending made-up details with real facts from Reubens’s own life. Despite being a heavy smoker, Reubens made sure never to be photographed with cigarettes while in costume. A cynic might read this as preservation of his brand image and earning potential, but Reubens turned down lucrative sponsorship deals for candy and other products he didn’t think were good for kids. The show was an outlier in the political economy of Saturday morning children’s television: it did not try to sell things through product placement and divested from systems like the gender binary, which otherwise defined 1980s children’s television and the toy industry, whose advertising funded this programming.40 Conky, Magic Screen, Globey, and Picture Phone also reject emerging children’s consumer culture. Literary theorist Ian Balfour describes the “excessive and hyperbolic,” “relentless personification” of the show as a refusal of commodity fetishism characteristic of 1980s children’s television.41 High-tech aspects of Conky or Magic Screen are contrasted with other low-tech activities Pee-wee relishes, like making puppets out of old socks.42 Refashioning old socks and forming deeper bonds with the technologies you already have rejects the planned obsolescence of cheap 1980s consumer electronics. The incongruities between Pee-wee’s DIY domestic sensibilities (Conky looks a bit homemade) and speculative network functions such as artificial intelligence and video conferencing help to locate the playhouse within a longer history of future-oriented, gendered domestic spaces.

Feminist media history is full of examples of future technologies modeled in domestic spaces that look like sets, the way Pee-wee’s 1950s playhouse, built in the mid 1980s does. In the mid-twentieth century, electric appliances were domesticated through public fairs, exhibitions, and displays in middle-class department stores. These models had names like Kitchens of the Future and Kitchens of Tomorrow and took up the cybernetic idea that good systems could be realized through feedback mechanisms, where the home learns to anticipate the needs of its residents.43 Future homes prototyped new conveniences that housewives could marvel at: cupboards that closed themselves, recipe computers connected to automatic ingredient dispensers, and hands-free speakerphones for the busy housewife. Many of these ambitious automations would never actually come to market, but within the expo space they stirred up demand for their more mundane counterparts. A new electric washing machine mom didn’t have to crank herself promised to save time while actually generating “more work for mother,” raising expectations for good housekeeping.44

According to media historian Lynn Spigel, future home prototypes were also deeply conservative structures promising a technologically progressive future attached to nostalgia for property ownership, privacy, and white gender roles.45 Spigel connects 1950s future homes to postmillennial smart homes, marketed in the twenty-first century as high-tech gateways to boomer values from the past: efficiently run, comfortable domesticity that supports family connection inside over community solidarities outside. For Spigel, nostalgia and futurism always work together. We can twist this idea for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which was made in the late 1980s to look like the 1950s but in over-the-top, campy, and deliberately out-of-time ways. The show yoked these time periods as a critique of 1980s Reaganism’s nostalgia for idealized white, suburban family life.46 In 1956, during his pre-presidential acting days, Ronald Reagan even starred in a series of future-home commercials for General Electric called “Live Better Electrically,” in which he and Nancy show off all the new “electric servants” in their ranch-style, California home. The women of color these “electric servants” purported to replace are not shown.

Conky, Magic Screen, Picture Phone, and Globey aren’t all that far off from what 1980s consumer electronics for the home promised to do, even though they were much simpler in practice. This decade was a period of increased domestic computerization through video games, personal computers, digital televisions, programmable coffee makers, digital fitness systems, and talking clocks. Media scholar Reem Hilu argues that these technologies were framed as either escapes from or transformations of domesticity through fantasies of technological control and self-empowerment.47 Their marketing was caught up in a resurgence of mid-century cybernetic ideas about command and control, applied to management of the household through monitoring and recalibration of the body and its activity.48 Pee-wee’s Playhouse threw in a cast of animate, networked technologies who belong in neither the 1950s nor the 1980s, and make the playhouse wilder and wackier rather than calm and efficient. Pee-wee animates this space through play and the relations that play facilitates, all the while committed to the bit.

When I look at Pee-wee in his kitchen, I see a kid playing with his food. The kitchen contraption that opens Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a Rube Goldberg machine for making breakfast. Taking up most of Pee-wee’s kitchen, the machine’s kinetic chain reaction is triggered by Pee-wee lighting a single tapered candle that slowly burns through a string. Pee-wee leaves the room to brush his teeth while the machine works, enlivening stored potential energy in all its component parts as they set each other off in sequence: frying eggs, making toast, flipping pancakes, pouring cereal, juicing oranges, and even dumping kibble into the giant bowl of his teacup-sized terrier, Speck.

The machine makes none of these tasks more efficient: most of the pancakes, flipped by an Abe Lincoln automaton, end up stuck to the ceiling. But it generates pure joy at what an utterly unprofitable, irrational technology might do, without a claim on data about our bodies, habits, or desires. This was another future that didn’t arrive because it never stood a chance. But there is delight, learning, and an even repair available through the act of looking back at how Pee-wee used to look forward, at play and in relation with all his beautiful machines.