A Look at Legendary Kids’ Entertainers Who Were Also Secret Scumbags

There is no such thing as an innocent child, as every parent and teacher knows. The life of a child is nasty, brutish and—so far—short. The playground is a place of ill-contained savagery, the violence of children's excitement or disappointment far more extreme than any adult could handle on a daily basis. So is it any surprise that many of the most popular children's entertainers are, in fact, the ones who are most able to tune into that natural sense of savagery and nastiness? That kids' writers are often total scumbags?

With Shel Silverstein's adult-only plays currently at Funhouse Lounge, and Pee-wee Herman burlesque at Dante's next week, we thought we'd take a look at legendary kids' entertainers who were also secretly dirty or awful.

Pee-wee Herman

Pee-wee Herman's original playhouse as a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe was more John Waters high camp than kid-show romp—a world of repressed or confused sex, including mermaid boobs and mirrors on your shoes to look up girls' dresses. But even on his kids' show, Paul Reubens threw in sly sexual innuendo—asking to watch his neighbor undress or buying "milk…milk…lemonade…and fudge 'round the corner!" So if Reubens had a thousand-strong porn collection and exposed his wee-wee at an adult theater in Florida in 1991, were we surprised?

Shel Silverstein

Best known as the author of bizarre children's poems, Shel Silverstein also created a bootleg album called Fuck 'Em in the 1960s. Here, he sings songs like "I'm Not a Fag" and "I Love My Right Hand," about masturbating, in which he rhymes "some men prefer adolescents" with "sexual acquiescence."

As a cartoonist for Playboy, he's said to have spent weeks at the Playboy Mansion and engaged in numerous affairs.  Among his many plays for adults, he wrote one featuring an auctioneer showing off a woman who is selling herself to the highest bidder.

Roald Dahl

Known in his native Britain as the "King of Nasty," Roald Dahl was better known in his earlier life for fucking everything that moved. Described by writer Alex Carnevale as "a hateful little fuck" even in his school days, Dahl caroused through colonial Africa—complaining about having to service his women too often. He wrote a series of stories for Playboy—whether about being assaulted by an ugly woman after accidentally giving her an aphrodisiac, about sex with a leper, or about slowly transforming into a giant working dick. Also, he wrote stories for your children about kids being punished horribly for chewing gum, and witches getting their bloody feet chopped off.

Maurice Sendak

In interviews, Maurice Sendak always liked to tell writers about his first unpublished book, in which a brother and sister fall madly in love with each other, declare themselves "inseparable" and then jump out the window, killing themselves rather than live a life without each other. Also, the "wild rumpus" in Where the Wild Things Are? That's sex, the author confirms. A lot of the stuff in Sendak's books is apparently sex. "I didn't set out to make children happy or make life better for them or easier for them," Sendak told Stephen Colbert in 2010 on The Colbert Report. Nonetheless, he managed to do so. Sex, for Sendak, was never quite dirty.

Dr. Seuss

Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel's 1939 illustrated book for adults, The Seven Lady Godivas, involved seven naked sisters courting the seven brothers Peeping. But that's tame compared to his illustration for a grotesquely racist 1929 department-store ad (top left), or his racist wartime cartoons of bucktoothed, Coke-bottle-glassed, conniving and murderous Japanese. He defended the latter cartoons to troubled readers of PM newspaper with the stirring words: "Right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: 'Brothers!'" However, Geisel later repented the Japanese cartoons at least—his book Horton Hears a Who! was a well-meaning if somewhat condescending parable about the U.S. occupation of Japan.

An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein is at Funhouse Lounge, 2432 SE 11th Ave., funhouselounge.com, on Thursday-Saturday through May 13. 7 pm. $12 advance, $16 at the door. 21+. Pee-wee's Burlesquehouse is at Dante's, 350 W Burnside St., danteslive.com, on Friday, May 5. 9 pm. $13. 21+.