In a way, I’m grateful for 50 Shades of Grey because the Dom/sub relationships of that story have given me a culturally relevant way to explain how stand-up comedy works.
Stick with me here — I swear I’m going to make this make sense.
Functionally, a night at a stand-up show is signing a contract with the comedian. They’ll give you all the jokes and laughs you could ever want (sometimes until it hurts), and in exchange you agree to be part of a good crowd, laughing at the appropriate times and not actively disrupting the proceedings.
There’s trust that the comedian will make you laugh and that the audience will listen to the often deeply confessional things the comedian is saying that informs the surprisingly delicate art that is stand-up comedy.
I partially bring this up because I’m pretentious and haven’t had much of an avenue to discuss stand-up comedy. But I bring it up more because after getting to see him as part of this year’s Dooley’s Week festivities, I’m fully convinced no comedian has a better understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of stand-up comedy than Pete Holmes, host of the You Made It Weird podcast and The Pete Holmes Show.
That understanding became clear as soon as Holmes came out into the Glenn Memorial Auditorium. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Glenn Memorial is a church on Emory’s campus that has also served inexplicably as the host for the majority of the comedians. Every comedian has commented on it (in my history at this school), and Holmes was no exception.
Holmes, however, seemed to decide to have a little bit more fun with the location than past Dooley’s Week comedians. He said that he felt a little more at home given the fact that “in the multiverse, this is the only universe where [he’s] a comedian. In every other universe, [he’s] a youth pastor.” He then proceeded to explore the space, delivering his material about God (borne out of a deeply religious upbringing) from the massive pulpit.
His opening was essentially a quick run-down of everything you need to say to connect with the crowd. Beside that little free-form play, he also did early crowd work, pretending to “lay hands” on a couple of folks in the crowd and asking a particularly muscular gentleman if he was going to be “v’ing Superman later.” Essentially, he established a rapid-fire connection with the crowd that put us firmly on his side for whatever else he wanted to do. For example, he delivered a great number of seemingly free-form tangents.
While attempting to come up with a series of words to swear at someone while in a parking lot, he seemed to settle on the phrase “cock butter bitch,” which inspired a filthy and hilarious tangent about having sex with a dick made of butter that had me laughing so hard I was crying.
“Sorry, it’s not gonna happen tonight. It’s a real Land O’ Lakes down there.”
Speaking of one of his filthier jokes, there’s a little bit of dissonance between Holmes’ presentation and his reliance on dirtier jokes for much of the set. I get it was likely oriented that way as a college set, but you definitely experience a bit of weirdness seeing a self-described youth pastor going through material about wetness and imitating porn faces. There’s a certain glee his comedic approach takes with barrelling into the material that definitely could have been off-putting for some.
Holmes’ style can be best described as “Dirty Brian Regan,” taking that comic’s high-energy delivery and voice work and compounding it with a willingness to “go blue” and with a more apparent looseness that Regan doesn’t have. There’s an improvisational feel that really works for Holmes, so whether it’s a prewritten bit or a tangent that misspeaking inspires him to go on, there’s this wonderful looseness.
Those tangents were often the funniest parts of his show. While this isn’t a slight against Holmes’ prewritten bits, definitely the more quotable parts of his show (“WHATCHU KNOW ABOUT GREEN EGGS AND HAAAAAAAAAAMMMMM”), there’s a certain raw comic energy that comes through in his tangents.
Through all this theory and analysis, the number one thing Pete Holmes brought was laughter. I laughed my ass off, and if you ever get a chance to check him out, you will, too.
Opinion Editor | Brandon Wagner is a College Senior from God Only Knows Where, America studying Film and Media Studies with a minor in Religion. This is his first year for the Wheel, in a likely misguided experiment to be a film critic. When he's not writing on the biggest blockbusters or the films of Spike Jonze or Andrei Tarkovsky or Zack Snyder, he's writing on comedic television, the future of gaming as an art, or the relationship between audience and cinematic experience. In other words, Brandon Wagner has basically nothing else going on but this.
