Get ready for the no-longer-PG-13 Pete Holmes tour
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It didn't take him long to realize some of his best material didn't fit. After one show in Austin, he scrapped the idea and renamed the tour. 'I was like, I don't want to do stand-up with one hand tied behind my back,' he said. 'I want to hit as hard as I can. I want to be as honest as I can. And I really want to make people laugh so hard, and sometimes you want to talk about pushing Hitler's dad off of Hitler's mom, and that was my favorite joke. It is still my favorite joke.' The show he's touring now is all new material, and he's got a filmed special he's currently shopping around to streamers.
Holmes's comedy springs from a number of frictions. He has acknowledged that he looks like he should be a youth pastor playing guitar for a rec hall full of teenagers (and in fact, was headed toward becoming one after being raised in an evangelical Christian family and attending Gordon College, a Christian school). And yet he will tell jokes about sex and bodily functions with somewhat explicit language. On top of that, some of his material reflects deep spiritual and intellectual questions about the nature of religious beliefs, or why, if everything is made of molecules, does his hand not just pass through a stool when he pats it (a topic he explored with Neil deGrasse Tyson on the 'You Made It Weird' podcast).
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The origin of the molecules bit came from one of Holmes's teachers at Lexington High School, who explained that a hand and a table are both made of molecules, and science doesn't have a reason why the hand doesn't just become part of the table when they touch. 'I was like, that's amazing,' Holmes remembered. 'I can't believe he's saying this. So I picked it up from LHS, and then I said it two decades later onstage, and then Neil deGrasse Tyson was checking my work, and thank goodness that that teacher and my memory were correct.'
According to Holmes, these disparate elements came together in him organically. He did not set out to be a wholesome-looking comic shocking people with scatological references. 'There was no scheme of going like, 'I look like I have resting Latter Day Saint face,' right?' he said. 'I look like more of a missionary. Well, wouldn't it be devilish if I went up and talked about whatever – adult topics?'
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In the beginning of his career, if the material was slanted a bit more toward pure silliness, that was still germane to Holmes's thoughts at the time. Now, Holmes and his wife have moved out of the city to a place where life moves a little more slowly, and that space is reflected in the new hour. 'I'm authentically reporting on what it's like to be a 46-year-old man alive today and feeling what it feels like,' he said. 'If I'm gonna write down a joke, I'm stealing time from, like, family dinner. It better be good.'
Holmes had always wanted to talk about religion in a deeper way onstage, but it wasn't until he was 33 that he was able to shed his inhibitions enough to address it head on. He remembers a specific show with fellow Mass. native Eugene Mirman at Union Hall in Brooklyn where he debuted a joke about how he loves Jesus, but it's just his followers he's not crazy about, making the comparison that you could love football and still think the people in the stands are insane. It was a baby step, but an important one.
'It was my first little foray into that,' Holmes said. 'But to tell that joke, I had to say, 'I love Jesus.' And even in a hipster bar in Park Slope, saying, 'I love Jesus,' my heart rate, like, shot. I got sweaty. I fumbled it.'
Part of his hesitancy was that he is always questioning his beliefs, and had no interest in trying to make a sweeping pronouncement for his audience to agree or disagree with. He just wanted to become, as he describes it, 'unembarrassed' to make a statement. 'I didn't even know if that was true,' he said. 'Did I love Jesus? It would have been more honest to say I was raised with Jesus, and I have a warmth and a fondness for that, but I didn't even know who I was, and it took a really, really long time.'
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There are practical concerns to the way Holmes constructs his act. Sometimes the silly stuff is a necessary break after a heavier question. And Holmes doesn't see a philosophical conflict with presenting the two things together. 'I think there's something powerful in sort of a warts-and-all approach to what I'm trying to create,' he said, 'because I take issue with the fact that God – or the creator of the universe, or whatever you want to say, the essence of the universe – prefers it if you and I only talk about gumdrops and lollipops. I really think that's actually aggressively offensive and an echo of our weird, puritanical past.'
Holmes thinks the taboos about profanity and sex are perhaps focused on the wrong things. Those aren't the dangerous concepts. 'It's the banal, stodgy, tick, 'Isn't winning great? Isn't eating great? Isn't being right great?'' he said. 'There's nothing of value being transmitted. There's nothing interesting being challenged. Everyone went in thinking that bacon is the best, and everyone's leaving thinking bacon is the best.'
He promises his audiences won't catch him ginning up a self-righteous joke where he came up with exactly the right thing to say to put some mythical jerk in their place. Not when there's an opportunity to tell people about something joyful, something that eased his stress or anxiety. 'In the second half of my career, you won't find me telling a story where I'm the smartest and the best and I won, and everyone else is an idiot,' he said. 'And I actually think that's the metric. Is it ugly? Not, 'is it clean or dirty.' Is it ugly? Is it helpful?'
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But then he laughs at himself, noting some people would think he was a joke for talking so high-mindedly in contrast to the amount of thought he's actually provoking. He smiles modestly, maybe hopefully, that there's something meaningful to take away from his work. 'You know, a little bit.'
PETE HOLMES: PETE HERE NOW
At The Wilbur, 246 Tremont St., Boston, Aug. 23, 7 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Tickets: $35-$55.
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