“My mom wanted me to be a youth pastor, and when I became a comedian, she said it was close enough.”
― Pete Holmes
“Ideally, a good pastor wants to empower a congregation to the point where they don’t need him. You want everyone to leave feeling better.”
― Pete Holmes
“When I grew up, my model of God was like a lifeguard: I knew He loved me, but He blew his whistle a lot.”
― Pete Holmes
“Losing your faith is an essential part of having a three-dimensional, vivid, vibrant faith.”
― Pete Holmes
“Literally, my honeymoon was driving to Chicago.”
― Pete Holmes
“When it comes to being called a pronoun, sometimes I like to call other people ‘me.’ I go, like, ‘Oh, these mes voted for Trump. This me is begging for change. This me is driving me to the airport.’ I find that useful instead of going, like – because it’s so pleasant to go ‘you.’”
― Pete Holmes
“We’d all like to increase pleasure and minimize pain, but the truth is, suffering, even collective suffering that we’re going through, is often the earmark that some real change is happening.”
― Pete Holmes
“The world is so mysterious, and there’s so many social interactions where I have no idea what I’m supposed to do – what’s being asked of me, what’s expected of me.”
― Pete Holmes
“A stand-up act is almost like a pool. You know what I mean? It’s like a pool, and you’re always skimming little leaves out of it, messing with the chlorine level, putting up umbrellas. You’re trying to make one little stagnant body of water perfect. Whereas a late-night show is like a river, always moving forward.”
― Pete Holmes
“I love alpha males.”
― Pete Holmes
“Every performer I talk to will, with different words, talk about the sanctity of a good standup show, how it can really feel spiritual. When everybody is laughing, fixed on the same thing, you feel like you transcend yourself.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’ll admit that I’m self-centered – all of us are – but I can also be external and giving and listening and empathetic and all that sort of stuff.”
― Pete Holmes
“When I look at what’s happening with #MeToo, my heart breaks, basically, for everybody involved.”
― Pete Holmes
“I hate when pastors have a gay son and then they become pro-gay.”
― Pete Holmes
“We can give space to someone’s depression. We can love them; we can honor – we can just eat some noodles, we can watch some movies, whatever it is. We can just sit and not talk. That’s real stuff. It’s a real – I don’t know if you call it a disorder, a disease, but it’s happening, and we don’t need to coach people through with ideologies.”
― Pete Holmes
“So we have the story of who we are. I’m a man, and I’m a comedian, and I’m a tall man. I have big teeth and all these things, and I like the first two Batman movies, and I don’t drink coffee, or whatever it is.”
― Pete Holmes
“I can’t speak for everybody. But I will say that for me, when I’ve been depressed – and I get depressed. I have irrational bouts of anxiety. I have random FedEx deliveries of despondency. Just like, ‘I didn’t order this. Oh, well, keep the PJs on, cancel everything you’re doing today. It’s time to take a sad shower.’”
― Pete Holmes
“Why do we say ‘Have a great weekend?’ That’s just a spell. You’re just going – I have no control over your weekend. But words matter. They change our interior world. Have a great weekend.”
― Pete Holmes
“Religion often is very embarrassing, and I totally get it. So I am sort of sometimes burdened with the fact that I love talking about it with anybody. Not just religious people.”
― Pete Holmes
“I really love the Frank Miller ‘Year One’ stuff.”
― Pete Holmes
“I love ‘Year One.’ I read ‘Year One’ over and over again.”
― Pete Holmes
“If I open a Batman book, and he doesn’t look right, I can’t do it. It has so much to do with the art.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m not going to have the TV personality and be like, ‘There’s no bitterness. There’s no ugliness.’ There’s bitterness. There’s ugliness. There’s pain. There’s greed. There’s malice, and there’s hurt. That’s all good stuff for any kind of art. I’m not necessarily feeding that side of myself, and I try not to encourage it too much.”
― Pete Holmes
“I think there’s something so funny about Ram Dass. I was lucky enough to sit across from him at dinner once, and I got up the courage to tell him that he was my favorite comedian. Even though he’s not a comic, he talks about showbiz in a certain way and understands that there’s a presentation to it.”
― Pete Holmes
“Good comedy can be liberating, and if I’m doing my job as a comedian, part of the joy for the audience is getting that release.”
― Pete Holmes
“When you slide into television, no one tells you exactly how manage expectations and work with your staff.”
― Pete Holmes
“I needed to let go of the idea of a God who was mad at me for feeling how I was feeling. Now, I bask in an understanding of the divine that delights in truth and the complexities of the human experience – even when it’s not very ‘clean.’”
― Pete Holmes
“Sometimes I liken the comedian’s lifestyle a little bit to a firefighter’s in the sense that there’s a lot of waiting and a lot of nothingness. And then there are moments of urgent firefighting.”
― Pete Holmes
“The biggest idea of a good time for me is making the Batman videos that we did. That is my ideal day. That is exactly what I want to be doing… I like doing cartoons. I like writing things.”
― Pete Holmes
“It’s hard to control the things that are going to inspire you.”
― Pete Holmes
“When I was in junior high, I went to a really hippy dippy Quaker school where we called our teachers by their first names and stuff.”
― Pete Holmes
“My wife left me when I was 28 in real life.”
― Pete Holmes
“I used to just want so badly to have afterlife insured and make sure I was going to heaven.”
― Pete Holmes
“I booked an E-Trade commercial. That’s a lucrative gig.”
― Pete Holmes
“I saved my money.”
― Pete Holmes
“Yeah, I had a talk show canceled. Okay, let’s go back to the list of people who had talk shows canceled. Johnny Carson had his first talk show canceled. Jon Stewart. Letterman. Conan O’Brien, if you look at ‘The Tonight Show’ as a show that got canceled.”
― Pete Holmes
“As soon as I heard the term ‘comedy nerd,’ I’d hoped there was a lot of them.”
― Pete Holmes
“I mostly do faces and sounds. That’s what I do. Comedy doesn’t have to be art.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m the weirdo that tells – asks – the Uber driver to please turn the radio down. I’m so polite about it, though.”
― Pete Holmes
“I thought divorce was for people that threw plates at each other, and I’d have to be an alcoholic or having affairs. But the truth is, sometimes a very sweet, well-meaning person just doesn’t do it for you, and you need to get out of there.”
― Pete Holmes
“I knew I wanted a ‘Girls’-type show about my life, but what’s the big thing that happened to me? Oh, I got married when I was young.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m not religious anymore, but I was raised religious.”
― Pete Holmes
“I always wanted to do something about what it’s like to get divorced, especially when it’s a young marriage to start with.”
― Pete Holmes
“When I got divorced, the first people I called were Nick Kroll and John Mulaney and T. J. Miller – all the pals.”
― Pete Holmes
“I remember talking to comedian Jimmy Pardo about his experience waiting to hear about his own pilot, and we both agreed on one thing: When you can’t control your showbiz fate, you can at least control the amount of ice cream you’re eating. And if you’re like us, it was a lot.”
― Pete Holmes
“Traffic: Sit there. Sit. Occasionally move your foot from the brake and crawl forward, then put it back. That’s all you do for hours. It’s very calming.”
― Pete Holmes
“I think ‘everything sucks’ is too often leaned upon as a comedic stance. It’s a really easy and pretty weak perspective.”
― Pete Holmes
“I wanted to be a pastor. I was going to be a youth pastor. I mean, I play guitar; I like to make people laugh.”
― Pete Holmes
“The skill set of pastor and comedian are incredibly similar. You want to affect people. You’re good at reading rooms. You’re persuasive, and you’re likable.”
― Pete Holmes
“I look at my faith like a room, and there was all of this furniture in there, but I had inherited most of the furniture. Then, when I got divorced, I took everything out just to see how I was going to refurnish the room, and that was a very essential step in my life. It was great.”
― Pete Holmes
“Whenever I make a blasphemous joke, I always say that I believe in a God big enough to know that I’m just kidding. How can God not know that I’m kidding? And also, how could God be offended at a thing that he made not believing in him?”
― Pete Holmes
“It’s funny – the reason I started doing a podcast was because every time I was on someone else’s podcast, I would take it over a little bit.”
― Pete Holmes
“It’s true that in show business, a lot of times a producer will just not ever be there, not even be aware that a show is renewed or canceled.”
― Pete Holmes
“When somebody comes across as authentic and genuine and sweet, people just want to spend time with that person.”
― Pete Holmes
“I felt like I was in a unique position, or I am in a unique position, to show the evangelical world in a way that I haven’t seen on TV before. That’s a world that I’m very familiar with.”
― Pete Holmes
“I think it can be easy at a certain point to take it for granted that you can kind of perform whatever you want.”
― Pete Holmes
“Every human being can relate to wanting their thoughts and their feelings to be accepted and rewarded and validated. So in that way, a stand-up is similar to almost any profession. It’s very simply just someone who wants to be heard and live authentically and express themselves.”
― Pete Holmes
“There’s something about taking emotional and career and relationship humiliations, writing them, acting them out again, but then redeeming them in some way.”
― Pete Holmes
“I love Batman to death.”
― Pete Holmes
“The only Batman that doesn’t need parodying is Adam West, but everybody else is fair game.”
― Pete Holmes
“I think a good comedian was probably bullied a little bit. Probably felt doughy and oblong and rhombus-shaped and strange and a little bit of an outsider, and then learned the healing qualities of comedy.”
― Pete Holmes
“What people respond to is intimacy and regularity.”
― Pete Holmes
“I love Jon Stewart.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m not the hugest comic book person, but I do love superheroes.”
― Pete Holmes
“I went and saw Letterman when I was 15, and that had a profound impact on me.”
― Pete Holmes
“When you think about a festival from a comedian’s perspective, it has to do with who else does it – that’s number one. The second consideration – and this is kind of crazy – is: ‘What’s the food like? What is the town like? Is it walkable? Is it easy to get around?’”
― Pete Holmes
“When you do stand-up, it’s so autonomous: I can say anything.”
― Pete Holmes
“I think what people respond to is someone being who they actually are.”
― Pete Holmes
“I was raised evangelical, so if you want to get offended, let’s get offended. I have a master’s degree in being offended.”
― Pete Holmes
“If I go out and do a set, there’s a good chance that I’ll watch another comedian. I’ll think – not necessarily their words, but oftentimes the message that’s behind the words – the sort of belief that their unspokenly advocating, well, sometimes that’s offensive.”
― Pete Holmes
“’Time to Move On’ is my favorite song.”
― Pete Holmes
“What I don’t think I knew when I was young was that ‘losing your faith’ is actually part of the plan for a lot of people – that it’s actually maybe the most beautiful and graceful thing that can happen. The mystery of God can handle all of it. It can handle all of your thoughts, all of your doubts, all of your folly. It’s all in the game.”
― Pete Holmes
“There’s nothing you can do to increase or decrease the love that God has for you, but there are things you can do that increase or decrease your awareness of that love. That’s certainly been my experience.”
― Pete Holmes
“Science would like to tell us that people laugh because of the benign violation theory, but comedy doesn’t have hard rules.”
― Pete Holmes
“I like squirm-laughing.”
― Pete Holmes
“When I used to work the road, I remember I used to ask myself in the mirror, literally, like in a movie, back when I was not very good at all, I’d say, ‘What’s it like being the greatest comedian in the world?’”
― Pete Holmes
“I didn’t like talking about my divorce. I think I viewed that as something that was embarrassing or a failure.”
― Pete Holmes
“Starting the podcast was an experiment. I wouldn’t say I was very private, but I was probably as private as the average person.”
― Pete Holmes
“The underlying goal of comedy is feeling not-alone.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m a comedian. Comedians are supposed to be jaded, cynical, angry people. But I’m not: I’m a silly, silly fun boy.”
― Pete Holmes
“Life is temporary. We die one day. Live it up!”
― Pete Holmes
“I think my mom recognized that I liked people to be happy. I like people to get along. And I like to be a peacemaker. And I liked the church. So she was like, ‘You should be a youth pastor.’”
― Pete Holmes
“I call myself ‘Christ-leaning,’ but that’s primarily psychological.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m down with Jesus, sweet Jeez, sweet baby Jeez.”
― Pete Holmes
“I am a comedian. My brain is critical – it’s overthinking – but you can find ways to turn it down and realize that’s not who you really are.”
― Pete Holmes
“Audiences sometimes emit these weird frequencies that make you think you’ve weirded them out.”
― Pete Holmes
“Joy is in learning to say yes to what is and to surrender into flow with what is, even when it’s what you don’t want.”
― Pete Holmes
“I disagree with the idea that everything happens for a reason.”
― Pete Holmes
“In real life, T. J. Miller is one of my best friends, and I’ll maybe see him for two or three days in a row, and then I won’t see him for four months. That’s just how our lives are.”
― Pete Holmes
“People like Bill Burr and Jim Gaffigan and Zach Galifianakis and Sarah Silverman – they were all amazing and helpful to me.”
― Pete Holmes
“When my wife left me, in real life, T. J. Miller was like, ‘I’m shooting a movie in Pittsburgh. I’ll fly you out and get you a hotel room,’ and I spent a week with him.”
― Pete Holmes
“Dorks are not exempt from bad behaviour.”
― Pete Holmes
“The idea of saying ‘the handsome Pete Holmes’ is preposterous.”
― Pete Holmes
“The beautiful thing about stand-up advice is that it applies to anybody, any gender, any race, any age. The best thing you can do – everybody will tell you – is get on stage as much as you can. I would add to that: get on stage as much as you can – with the people you admire.”
― Pete Holmes
“When I started, I was very deliberate about making friends with people like John Mulaney who were really funny and wanted to go up and do as many open mics as I did.”
― Pete Holmes
“There’s something about a podcast that feels like two people in a closet with the lights off.”
― Pete Holmes
“Comedians really are like a species. That’s not to be exclusive. Anyone can kind of become one. You have to pay your dues, though.”
― Pete Holmes
“I think a lot of pain in people’s lives comes from not being open and honest about what they really think, what they really feel, what they like, what they don’t like.”
― Pete Holmes
“I’m super happy to say that it’s not that hard to write bad stand-up. I guess the trick is to write bad stand-up that sounds like you’re trying to be good.”
― Pete Holmes
“There are elements of comedy that can be competitive and back stab-y, but one of the underreported sides is that we love each other and help each other, kind of like a messed up extended family.”
― Pete Holmes
Leave a Reply