Dan Monahan is one character, played three times: Pee Wee, the smallest and most frustrated boy in Porky's, the one every prank lands on. He takes the humiliation well. The films around him did not deserve the care he put into it.
Fi1m perspective
In Porky's (1981) the boys stand in a group and Pee Wee stands at the edge of it, wanting what the others claim already to have had. Dan Monahan plays him small, frantic and permanently thwarted, and when the joke is on him, which is most of the time, he takes it with his whole body. It is physical comedy of the old kind: a boy who cannot keep still because nothing he wants will arrive. Bob Clark points most of the sex jokes at him or through him, and Monahan does not flinch from any of them.
He had been on stage before that, including a Broadway revival of Richard III in 1979, and in a couple of films, Paradiso Blu (1980) and Only When I Laugh (1981). Then Pee Wee arrived and stayed. He played him again in Porky's II: The Next Day (1983) and Porky's Revenge (1985), with Clark and the same ensemble around him: Mark Herrier, Wyatt Knight, Kaki Hunter and Nancy Parsons, three films each. Between them came Up the Creek (1984), another campus comedy, and supporting parts in comedies through the late 1980s. After that the credits thin out: The Night Flier (1997), Baby Geniuses (1999), and Friar Lawrence in a Romeo and Juliet (2000), his last listed part. He has not acted on screen since around then.
We gave Porky's 58, and we stand by it. Two or three set pieces are properly funny, a great deal of the rest is not, and its idea of a good time has aged badly. Nancy Parsons is the reason to stay. That is awkward for Monahan, because the sex gags are the part that has aged worst and Pee Wee is at the centre of them. We laughed at Porky's less than it wanted us to, and felt worse about it than we expected, and most of what we were not laughing at had Pee Wee in the frame. None of that is Monahan's fault. He is doing the job the film asked of him, and doing it with timing the film did not always match.
The criticism that follows him is the obvious one: he did not get far beyond the persona, and the parts after the trilogy were smaller. We would put it differently. He was very good at one thing in a kind of film that stopped being made, and when it stopped, so did he. The boy who could never get the girl finished his screen career in a cassock, in Shakespeare, which is not the ending anyone would have predicted in 1981. It is a tidier last line than most of his films managed.
Biography
Dan Monahan is an American actor born on 20 July 1955 in Ohio. He graduated from Olmsted Falls High School and studied business and drama at Ohio University, including its Professional Actors Training Program. He is best known for portraying Edward 'Pee Wee' Morris in the Porky's trilogy of films: Porky's (1981), Porky's II: The Next Day (1983) and Porky's Revenge (1985).
Monahan's other film credits include Only When I Laugh (1981), Up the Creek (1984), From the Hip (1987), The Night Flier (1997) and Baby Geniuses (1999). He was active in film and television from the late 1970s until 2000.
