Pinky Lee

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times cultural reporter Guy Trebay had an article yesterday comparing Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) to a long-forgotten performer, Pinky Lee.  Trebay comments that Paul Reubens’s trademark style and look took plenty of its inspiration from Pinky Lee.  Here is an excerpt.

“Origin stories are notoriously hard to pin down in the humor business, since only the creator knows where the joke began. Lineages, on the other hand, are a lot easier to trace. The comedian Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, who died this week of cancer at 70, belongs to a long line of American comics stretching back to the golden age of television and, beyond it, to the early days of vaudeville and burlesque.

Though Pinky Lee is an unfamiliar name today, it would not have been to a man of Mr. Reubens’s generation. As a baby boomer, he would surely have grown up on the televised antics of a comedian famed for many of the same tics, bits and gimmicks that Mr. Reubens would later adopt — beginning with an absurdist stage name.

Pee-wee Herman was born Paul Rubenfeld in 1952 in Peekskill, NY; Mr. Lee was born Pincus Leff in 1907 in Saint Paul, Minn. Rubenfeld, who was a talented child actor, would rename himself Reubens and become an improv comic. His early work with the The Groundlings in Los Angeles, notably in a Pinky parody skit, would eventually form the basis for one of the more indelible characters in show business. Mr. Lee came up through the ranks as a tap dancer on the vaudeville circuit. After turning to comedy routines, he made a tidy if minor career for himself as a supporting player in films like “Lady of Burlesque” (a nutty 1943 mystery that centers on a G-string as a murder weapon). He also starred in a series of westerns with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, including the eminently forgettable “South of Caliente” (1951), in which Lee took fourth billing, beneath the screen cowboy’s palomino, Trigger.

So much of what we think of as uniquely Pee-wee Herman can be readily traced to Pinky Lee: There was the shrunken child’s-size hat his character wore, the rapid-fire way of talking. There were also his goofy, mincing soft-shoe dances, his trademark lisp. And there was a signature catchphrase — a version of the slowburn comeback echoing in the mind of every subteen.

Pinky Lee: Credit…Getty Images

Pee-wee Herman performing in Chicago in 1984.Credit…Paul Natkin/Getty Images

“Oooooh! You make me so mad!” Pinky Lee would say.

“I know who you are, but what am I?” was the Pee-wee Herman version.

A forerunner of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” “The Pinky Lee Show” ran during the 1950s before “The Howdy Doody Show,” a top-rated afterschool television program starring a gaptoothed, flame-haired and rubber-faced ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Yoo-hoo, it’s me,” went the opening theme song Mr. Lee performed (sang is not quite the word – be sure to visit this link).  Here are the lyrics,

Yoo hoo, it’s me,

My name is Pinky Lee.

I skip and run bring lots of fun

To every he and she.

It’s plain to see

That you can tell it’s me

With my checkered hat

And my checkered coat,

The funny giggle in my throat

And my silly dance

Like a billy goat.

Put ’em all together,

Put ’em all together,

And it’s whooooo?

As a toddler in the 1950s,  I watched Pinky Lee and Howdy Doody!  I can still vividly recall Pinky Lee singing his theme song.

Tony

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