By Nick A. Zaino Globe correspondent, Updated May 15, 2025
Pete Holmes sidestepped a major miscalculation at the beginning of his “Pete Here Now” tour, which comes to the Wilbur for two shows on Aug. 23. He originally called it “PG-13,” and tailored the material to match the theme. He went as far as studying what kinds of material he could get away with in a standard PG-13 film.
“The movie ‘The Martian’ with our boy, Matt Damon,” said the Lexington native, speaking by Zoom from a Toronto tour stop, “he says the ‘F’ word twice in ‘The Martian.’ And I was like, okay, so I guess I can say the ‘F’ word twice, and then I had these absurd conversations. I was like, can you do a joke about pushing Hitler’s dad off of Hitler’s mom to stop him from being conceived? Is that PG-13?”
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).