Herbert Butros Khaury, better known by his stage name, Tiny Tim, had an odd but successful career for a good part of his life and was, as one might think upon reading his story, kind of an oddity since not only did he perform in falsetto a lot, but he was kind of an odd-looking individual. But his talent was real enough, and the idea that people enjoyed him was hard to ignore. Those that remember him, as he passed away in 1996, are likely to remember that ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ was a big part of his fame since he sounded almost completely feminine while singing the song, but it was haunting all the same. Tiny Tim is the kind of star that proves that no matter how odd a person looks or how strange their performance might be, there are always those out there that are going to find them interesting and worth paying attention to. But the price of Khaury’s fame was that his health and his mental and emotional stability suffered throughout the length of his career since as a lot of people said he was more or less in love with the idea of being famous, and didn’t know how to handle it in a healthy way. As soon as he started getting famous he started to change in a number of ways, but many would say that very few of them were good. The documentary is going to be narrated by Weird Al Yankovic, who will likely be at his least funny in order to pay respect to a performer that was definitely on the awkward side but was still capable of entertaining quite a few people in his time.
In a big way, it feels as though Tiny Tim didn’t know how to handle his fame when it came, but he was obviously seeking it since this was something that he wanted from the time he was young. One has to wonder though what makes one person successful and capable of handling and holding onto that success, and what others might be missing or doing wrong now and again. It might not have been that he really did anything wrong to put it nicely, but there was a quality to Tiny Tim that felt a little off when watching his performances, a quality that he might have lacked, or something else that was destined to make him famous but would also take him down a very strange and possible dark road at times. It does feel as though there was a passion there that he didn’t fully understand but grasped at all the same in an effort to make it work for him. While he managed to do this more than once and found success in the doing, Khaury still had the look of someone who wasn’t fully complete, as though he had yet to make the full transition to firmly lay hold of his fame and his life, to be honest.
He wasn’t inept or even foolish, but there was something there that felt as though it hadn’t developed fully in him, a quality that came and went since there were plenty of times that he appeared confident and fully capable of putting on a good show. But something in his eyes, his posture, even the way he smiled, said that there were other matters going on beneath the surface. It’s likely that many of those that knew him best recognized this, and were worried for his well-being, but in the interest of letting him be who he was, they did nothing. It’s been reported that at one time when he was younger, his mother was thinking of putting him in a mental healthward, but in the end, she decided not to. Somehow it doesn’t feel that a mental institution would have done much of anything for Khaury since the guy wasn’t exactly flipped, but it was easy to say that he did act in a manner that has confused a lot of people on the regular. Today some of those folks are labeled as geniuses and are considered to be among the best entertainers in the business.
All in all, it does sound as though the documentary is going to do its best to be fair handed and that Weird Al will likely refrain from getting wacky with this one since it would show a great deal of respect for a fellow performer and someone that did manage to enlighten a lot of lives while he was still here. It’s not at all surprising to hear that Tiny Tim disregarded a doctor’s advice to entertain his fans, especially given that he wanted the fame to such a degree that he was willing to put himself at risk to make it happen. It will be fun to learn more about him.
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