Reviving Pee-Wee’s Career Was No Small Feat

Bye-bye, Pee-wee. Hello, Paul.

Paul Reubens, who made his “Pee-wee Herman” character a household word before his 1991 arrest on a morals charge, has signed a sitcom deal, TV Guide reports.

Reubens, who’s had a recurring role on “Murphy Brown,” will play a number of characters in a show for Carsey-Werner, producers of such hits as “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne” and “3rd Rock From The Sun.”

“Paul is an idea machine,” a Carsey-Werner executive said. “We haven’t settled on anything yet, but it will be more high-concept, like ‘3rd Rock from the Sun,’ than a traditional sitcom.”

Pee-wee isn’t gone for good. MGM/UA Entertainment is releasing home video versions of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” for the holidays.

Loose talk

Janeane Garofalo, on judging character: “You can tell a lot about a person by how excited they are to do the Macarena.”

Party games? Well, how about hopscotch?

Eddie Rabbit turns 55 today.

Hey, when you’re hooked, you’re hooked

So why did Elizabeth Hurley stay with Hugh Grant following his dalliance with a prostitute on the Sunset Strip last year? “Why does anybody stay together? Because they want to be together, I suppose,” she told an interviewer. “I don’t think it’s particularly cryptic.”

But she still has her mother’s whip lashes

Carlos Leon, whom the cynics don’t expect will last long as Madonna’s main squeeze, is as proud as he can be about their baby girl, Lourdes. Leon tells TV Guide that fatherhood has “totally changed my life. All I can say is, it’s great being a dad. She’s got my eyelashes.”

And all he usually calls her is ‘Ahoy, there’

On Oprah Winfrey’s talk show the other day, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince confided that he would be “terrified” if his wife, Mayte, called him by his old name.

She knows what it’s like to go Hungary

Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was ordered to help out at a shelter for poor mothers and their children as part of her 1989 sentence for slapping a police officer, has kept doing it of her own free will. “I try to cheer them up, that’s all,” said Gabor, who bought 100 turkeys for Thanksgiving. “It’s a small thing really, darling, but I know it means so much to them.”

It’s the sneaky meal that gets the grease

There may be more than meets the eye to diet queen Jenny Craig. According to Mirabella magazine, during a visit to a cooking school in Tuscany, Craig insisted the chef start making bruschetta without using olive oil - but, “as soon as her friends left the room, La Signora Dieta came back into the kitchen and secretly ate six bruschetta with olive oil.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino