We bid our most solemn farewell to the great Paul Reubens, the founder of the original Playhouse and the most direct comedic and stylistic influence of everything we have done at Sammy Sosa's Playhouse. This obituary will be written out of character. In all likelihood, it will be the final article ever written for Sammy Sosa's Playhouse. We had been on an indefinite hiatus anyway, and it would feel wrong to continue this website with the man who started it all having departed from life.

In addition to the name of our website being lifted directly from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and our site aesthetics and theme being lifted from the decor of the actual Playhouse setting in puppetland, the Paul Hauss character on Sammy Sosa's Playhouse is named after Paul Reubens. Our cast of talking animals who like baseball for some reason was inspired by Pee-Wee Herman's surrounding cast. The whole reason Sammy Sosa's Playhouse is what it is comes from the psychological impact that Pee-Wee's Playhouse implanted into our salvia-rotted millennialist brains. When we first saw that iconic Pinterest page of Sammy Sosa in a yellow sweater strutting around an empty penthouse, pointing at everything and nothing with childlike wonder, our minds immediately went to Pee-Wee. That photoshoot conjured up the image in our heads that Sammy Sosa was a Pee-Wee Herman-like character living in a Puppetland that only he could see. That connection we made coils be interested as an early onset of schizophrenia, but for us, it just meant that Pee-Wee Herman represented such a specific kind of character and a shorthand for a set of cultural references and plot implications that it made perfect sense to shape our dumb comedy baseball site around the mold of Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

Your parents, teachers, President Reagan, and other adult authority figures may have hated Pee-Wee's Playhouse, but it will always hold a very special place in the hearts of this website's creators, our generation, and anyone who loves brilliant comedy, character work, and art. If there was a Cooperstown of Comedy, Paul Reubens should be a unanimous inductee.  

Rest in Peace, Paul Reubens.