When Paul 'Pee Wee Herman' Reubens accepted a random invitation to a 'hillbilly' dinner

Paul Reubens was always an enigmatic celebrity: a largely private person with a flair for performance art, making most of his public appearances in character as comedy icon Pee-wee Herman. On the rare occasions when he stepped out from behind that carefully crafted persona, the results were fascinating—and often just as entertaining.

On one such occasion in the early 2000s, Reubens appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman, delighting the host with stories about how he occasionally hung out with strangers who invited him to parties. "You’re walking down the street, and somebody says, 'Hey, Dave, my girlfriend’s having a barbecue. Come on over to the house Saturday,’" Letterman said, setting up his guest. "That happens a lot, and you think, 'Thanks, but I’m painting the barn.' But when that happens to you…" Taking over, Reubens interjected, "I used to always go, 'Yeah, I’ll be right over' and then not write it down. But a couple years ago I decided I was going to start taking people up on those. I had some unbelievable experiences like that."

One time, the actor was invited to a dinner by someone he "knew but not well." It wound up being a hilarious fish-out-of-water encounter straight out of a movie script. "They said, 'Would you come over and meet my family? My parents would like to have you over for dinner,’" he recalled. "I went over, and it turned into this kinda hillbilly, weird thing where I was sitting around this table. Trucks were pulling up, and there were chickens in the backyard. People were getting out of the car and going, 'I’m Donnie’s sister’s cousin’s secretary’s friend. I can’t believe you’re really here.’ I sit down at the table, and there’s no other place to sit, and there’s like eight people back from the table all the way around. Like 40, 50 people. Everyone had eaten already, so it was just kinda like, 'Hey, look at him eat!' They were following the fork, like [marveling], ’Ooh,’ up to the mouth and stuff. And at some during it, somebody actually said—to someone else, not to me—'This is just about like having Marilyn Monroe over here.'"

The actor also shared another bizarre encounter where he attended a friend’s birthday party and accepted the hang-out invitation of people parking cars. "I thought they were college kids, but turns out they were high school kids," he said. "I get out there, and there’s a bonfire and all these pickup trucks backed in with kegs on them and all these kids walking around with paper cups of beer, and they’d called on the cell phone to say, 'Pee-wee Herman’s coming out here,' so all the kids were like, 'Wooow.' This kid came up to me and was like, 'Excuse me, Mr. Herman, I just want to apologize for the way all these kids are acting 'cause they don’t know how to act around you [vomits]. He barfed all over himself."

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Reubens had a special comedic connection with Letterman, having made numerous appearances in character as Pee-wee Herman during the early and mid-'80s. "I had an opportunity to go on Late Night With David Letterman, and that show was new and gaining traction at the time," he recalls in Matt Wolf’s 2025 HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself. "There was some kind of really great, magical chemistry that happened between us. He was like the straight man, and I would just go berserk and be crazy around him. I started to become kind of a semi-regular on the show, and for about two years I was on Late Night With David Letterman every two months, and I would spend the time in between thinking of ideas and writing material to do on the show. I was being a performance artist in mainstream pop culture."

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