Pete Holmes Teaches Bobby Lee the Way of the Whites

Bobby Lee has a problem. He has three Filipino family members living with him who have never seen Mad Max: Fury Road, and he is trying to fix that. This takes up a solid chunk of episode 319 of Bad Friends, the part where Bobby and Andrew Santino debate whether his houseguests will tolerate the Coen Brothers (verdict: no on The Big Lebowski, maybe on No Country for Old Men) and whether The Godfather is too slow-burn for an 18-year-old from the Philippines. It is, as these things tend to be on Bad Friends, absolutely not about movies.

It is about Bobby wanting to share the things he loves. Which is sweet. Then Pete Holmes arrives, and the episode finds its actual subject: what white American domestic customs look like to two men who grew up outside them. Holmes, ginger and cheerful and theoretically the expert, is recruited to explain. Baking soda in the freezer to kill odors. Gas in the car before the warning light. Paying taxes quarterly. Putting actual pennies in penny loafers, which his friend Judy Greer still does. Bobby receives each piece of information like a man who has lived among these people for decades and is only now getting the handbook.

I want to learn the way of the white.

Lord Farquad at Your Service

Before Holmes shows up, the episode gives you the best bar story of the year so far. Santino, allegedly buzzing on edibles, told their friend and producer McCone that he looked exactly like Lord Farquad from Shrek. Then gave him a pickup line to use on a woman across the bar: walk up, ask if she’s seen Shrek, and when she says yes, introduce yourself as Lord Farquad. McCone did it. It worked. The women loved it. Then the woman he liked told him she was a lesbian, and McCone, a 54-year-old man, responded by raising a Black Power fist. Bobby watched the whole thing from across the room on video, no audio, just the silent film of a man’s night dying in real time.

He asked for the girl’s number and she said, ‘I’m a lesbian.’ And then he puts his black power fist up.

The three of them spend a generous amount of time workshopping what gestures white men are actually permitted to do in that situation. The wave. The shaka. Rock on. Not the fist. Holmes, who is extremely white, confirms the fist is not theirs to use. This is careful, earnest harm-reduction advice delivered about a situation that happened because a man compared himself to a Shrek villain as a romantic opening. Bad Friends at its best is exactly this: the premise is insane, but the logic inside it is airtight.

Shane Gillis, Eric Andre, and the Beef Inventory

Holmes brings up Shane Gillis, specifically a New Faces set he hosted where Gillis did a Special Olympics bit, murdered the room, and Holmes was standing there feeling like a proud older comedian watching someone on the edge of something huge. His point is that the SNL firing, in hindsight, freed Gillis completely. Bobby agrees without hesitation. Neither of them say this with any particular outrage in either direction, which is itself a take.

Then Bobby does a brief audit of his current beefs. Robbie Hoffman, resolved by text. Eric Andre, an old wound from when Bobby got a MADtv slot Andre wanted, aged twenty-five years and recently reopened, now apparently healing because Andre invited Bobby on tour. Santino’s diagnosis is characteristically direct: Bobby enters every room sending out sonar pings to see what version of people he’s getting, because he grew up not knowing what was coming. Holmes calls it a wild man energy, means it as a compliment, and Bobby accepts it as the most accurate thing anyone has said about him in weeks.

I come in, I go, Bobby, and I mean this in the best way. Is it like a wild man? Like if I had five… if the doors of the elevator are closing, I’m going to go see Bobby Lee tonight. They get off the elevator. Who’s that? Ah, he’s kind of like a wild man. That’s what I would say.

The episode ends with Holmes teaching everyone a game called Smallest Smile, where you look down, come back up with a neutral face, and produce the tiniest perceivable smile you can manage. Santino is annoyingly good at it. The mustache, Holmes notes, highlights every micro-movement. Bobby cannot stop laughing long enough to attempt it. It is a fine ending for an episode about a man who fills up his gas tank when he feels like it, hard-boiled his first egg at an indeterminate age, and is genuinely grateful someone finally told him about the baking soda.