It’s been just over a month since “The Pete Holmes Show” began airing midnights on TBS, and launching a new late night show makes it difficult to reach a host. We actually couldn’t lock in a time with Holmes until the day before his last taping of the season, although the shows will continue to air throughout the month.
When we spoke by phone, Holmes was clearly having a great time and taking his work seriously, so what follows is a serious discussion of topics like towel washing and sleep deprivation.
CraveOnline: Which of the original new bits and sketches are you feeling good about?
Pete Holmes: That’s a fair question. Not to be cheesy, I really have enjoyed every single thing we’ve done on the show. I suppose more to your point, there are some things I like more than others. I really love “Wash My Damn Towels.” That’s maybe my favorite thing that we’ve done so far. If you watch the second time that we did “Wash My Damn Towels” on the show, that is some of the most fun I’ve had, just in life, but it happened to be on camera. It was really fun.
Then also, all the guests have been wonderful, but when Rory Scovel was on, that was honestly one of the hardest times I’ve laughed in my life was just riffing with him. Also “New Material Seinfeld” I would say is something that sticks out to me. Any time that I can sit around with the writers and write bad Seinfeld jokes and then have them told to me through a puppet is a good time by my watch.
Apart from that, I’ve been very proud of the different monologues that we’ve been doing. We do some that are just very, very silly. In fact we’re very deliberate about that. We’re like, “It’s been getting a little, not heavy, but we’ve been tackling a thing. Let’s just do something that’s deliberately silly.” Some of those have been my favorites, but then also the ones where we’re kind of making a point. We did one recently that I was quite proud of which was about how you shouldn’t put your girlfriend or boyfriend on a pedestal that I thought was really, really funny, but was actually at its heart about why I got divorced, or one of the reason why I was divorced. So I thought any time we’re doing something that is uniquely me, that feels new and interesting, that hasn’t been done on late night before is always going to stick out for me.
Even though it’s still early, “Wash My Damn Towels” and “New Material Seinfeld” are likely to become ongoing sketches?
Yeah, if I get my way and so far nobody’s put up too much a fuss when I want to do those bits again. They both came up twice. Let’s hope that we’re having a conversation about the evolution of “New Material Seinfeld” and where “Wash My Damn Towels” went after our 50th episode.
How many more damn towels can you wash?
I know, we’ve got to find a knew way to explore the genre.
Was it always going to be your plan to bring your Batman to “The Pete Holmes Show?”
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always had such a good relationship with those guys over at College Humor. That’s where we met a lot of the crew that we enjoy working with. That’s where we met our makeup people and our wardrobe people. It really was a dream come true, not just to bring the idea of the Batman parodies to the show, but also to bring a lot of those wonderful people to the show with us and give them like a steady job because we do have such a good relationship with them. I think one of the reasons we have this show is because things like Batman did so well in the past.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in this day and age there are so many resources to make your own stuff, people don’t really believe you can do something until you’ve already done it. When we were like, “We want to do sketch videos” and we told that to TBS, it was very helpful to say, “And we’ve been doing that for a while now.” So that was a real dream come true to bring one of my favorite things to do to the show.
How are you finding on camera interviews different than the podcast interviews you’ve done?
It’s a completely different beast. I like to think that the sensibility is similar, that we’re asking a lot of the guests what their religious feelings are or how they lost their virginity or whether or not they’ve done psychedelics. Stuff like that, stuff that used to and still does come up on the podcast a lot, so we’re trying to do that in a six minute form, but it’s a lot more like almost doing an improv scene with a person.
The best interviews that we’ve had are when we get to play together and have something genuine happening. I’m very proud that we’ve gone very strong. We’ve done pretty much every episode without really going to the cards, just improvising, just following an instinct and the guest going with that and finding stuff organically, and that’s very similar to the podcast.
The difference is when you do it in front of an audience, you’re trying to get a laugh every so many seconds, so it just change the tone. Whereas on the podcast you can sometimes go 15,20, 40 minutes without a laugh and then because of the stories you’ve been telling, it’ll pay off later. Certainly you can’t do that on the show. Also of course the podcast sometimes runs four hours and our interviews are about six minutes. That’s of course the biggest difference.
Even if you go longer and put them on the website.
Yeah, it’s more like the live podcasts. When we do the live podcasts, we’ll talk for 15 minutes. It just has a different feel. In my opinion it can be more entertaining, more traditionally entertaining, which is why I think they’re so fun on the show, but that’s one of the reasons why I don’t want to stop doing the podcast. There’s always going to be a need in my life to have those more drawn out, slower conversations that don’t have the burden of cameras or an audience or a producer or budget. It’s just me and a person and we’re just recording it.
Are you involved in the pre-interviews for your guests?
No and we do very little pre-interview. I don’t like knowing the answers. Our segment producer will tell me, “You might want to ask him about this or this” but we’re really trying to keep it like Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” where they would often not do a pre-interview, where they would just try and find something in the moment. Right now, we’re enjoying that. I think at some point maybe, you do this long enough, you’ll start needing the pre-interview a little bit more but right now we’re enjoying being so new that every episode is so exciting that we can just kind of go off of that energy.
