Pete Holmes on Silly Silly Fun Boy, Carousel Guilt, and the Case for Paying for Your Porn

Pete Holmes walks into Andrew Santino’s studio wearing what get identified as sandals, immediately sparking a riff about Adam Sandler starting a sweatpant company called Foo Boo, and the episode has already told you exactly what you’re in for. This is not a press junket. Holmes has a new special, Silly Silly Fun Boy, free on his YouTube channel, and a children’s book, Spells to Cast on Your Parents, available for pre-order. He will mention both. But the plugs are basically accidental, swallowed whole by two hours of free association that moves from candy theater etiquette to OnlyFans labor rights without seeming to try.

The best stretch is Holmes workshopping bits that aren’t done yet, which turns out to be more interesting than polished material. He floats a joke about the biblical Cain killing Abel being equivalent to murdering two billion people today, then admits a friend dared him to write a joke with ‘genocide’ as the punchline. Santino, to his credit, calls it correctly.

A friend of mine dared me to write a joke where the punchline was genocide. I thought that would make it funnier.

The joke actually lands. Holmes is at his best when he’s thinking out loud about what makes something permissible to laugh at, and Santino is a genuinely good straight man for it, someone who will say ‘that’s pretty good, right?’ about his own material and mean it as a question, not a boast. Their bit about diseases you’re allowed to mock, the short answer being type 2 diabetes, lupus, and psoriasis, runs on so long it loops back around to being structurally funny.

The Carousel Confession

Holmes previews a story from Silly Silly Fun Boy about the time his friend’s toddler went missing at a park in Los Feliz. His friend was frantic. Holmes was… at the carousel with his own daughter. He had already stepped through the turnstile. He rode the carousel while shouting the missing child’s name from the ride. It is a perfect joke because the cowardice is so specific and so recognizable. He’s using the alpha position of the stage, as he puts it, to confess to something genuinely embarrassing, and arguing that’s the whole point.

I’m on the ride going, ‘River!’ Keeping an eye out.

The theory he builds around it is sincere and, unusually for podcast philosophy, not annoying. He’s not doing comedy with a purpose, he says, he’s just reporting on what it feels like to have a body and make bad choices in real time. His riff on Plinko as a metaphor for anxiety, borrowed from The Price Is Right, somehow connects to his mushroom trip in Vegas three nights prior, where he watched his cousin play roulette for an hour and a half and almost gave the table his lucky number before stopping himself.

Pay for Your Porn, Philosophically Speaking

The episode’s strangest and most earnest detour arrives late, when Holmes builds a genuinely coherent argument about the American porn industry, free tube sites, and OnlyFans as an ethical corrective. He’s not doing a bit. He acknowledges, repeatedly, that it’s not funny, which is what makes it weirdly compelling. The argument is that the same country that criminalized jaywalking and invented the concept of stalking as a legal offense has completely normalized theft from people whose labor it is ashamed to acknowledge. He ties it to prison rape, the Fantastic Mr. Fox copyright system blocking him from making a photo book for his daughter, and the observation that no politician will ever run on a platform of these people have bills.

Look them in the eye. Buy them dinner. Pay their rent, you coward.

Santino’s response, ‘God, I love you,’ is the correct response. Holmes ends the episode with a one-phrase sign-off that ties the whole thing together with a bow. It is, unusually, the actual thesis of a two-hour conversation. ‘Pay for your porn.’ Clean. Committed. Somehow the most Pete Holmes sentence imaginable.

I think a good hour of stand-up should be like an epic dream or a mushroom trip.