Paul Reubens had a small part as a waiter in "The Blues Brothers". The character of "Pee-wee Herman" originated during a 1978 improvisation exercise with The Groundlings, where Reubens came up with the idea of a man who wanted to be a comic but was so inept at telling jokes that it was obvious to the audience that he would never make it. Fellow Groundling Phil Hartman would afterwards help Reubens develop the character while another Groundling, John Paragon, would help write the show. Despite having been compared to other famous characters, such as Hergé's Tintin and Collodi's Pinocchio, Reubens says that
Paul Reubens company of minors without the permission of a parent or legal guardian. Reubens later stated that he was a collector of erotica, including films, muscle magazines and a sizable collection of mostly homosexual vintage erotica, such as photographic studies of teen nudes. Reubens said that what the city attorney's office viewed as pornography, he considered to be innocent art and that what they described as people underage engaged in masturbation or oral copulation was, in fact, a judgmental point of view of the nudes that Reubens described as people "one hundred percent not" performing sexual acts. Being an avid collector,