Pete holmes faces and sounds review năm 2024

If you haven’t yet watched the new Pete Holmes stand-up hour, Faces and Sounds, it debuted Saturday night on HBO and delivers — and not just because of his many titular faces and sounds!

Here’s an excerpt from my review in Decider:

HBO’s audience may not be as familiar with Pete Holmes as you are.

After all, despite filming an hour stand-up comedy special for Comedy Central in 2013, followed immediately by two seasons of hosting The Pete Holmes Show in late-night after Conan on TBS, Holmes hasn’t yet established himself as a household name or face. His upcoming sitcom, Crashing, likely will rectify that situation. So HBO wisely set aside this new hour, Pete Holmes: Faces and Sounds, on Saturday to introduce him properly and give you reasons to root for Crashing to do anything but come February.

The 37-year-old comedian from Massachusetts already has won you over vocally, either from years of voicing the talking E-Trade baby for years on TV commercials, or from his hugely popular podcast, You Made It Weird.

So he doesn’t need more of an introduction when he bounds onstage at the Vic in Chicago, where Holmes started to find his comedy voice after college.

Even that moment, in itself, is enough to suffice for Holmes. “That was the best moment of my life,” he says upon taking the microphone. “We don’t even have to do the show. This is just a bonus now. That felt so good, we should take turns. Each of you should come up one at a time just to feel that. Diseases that are forming will go away.”

Spending time with Holmes does feel like a bonus. He wants his company, onstage or off, to share in the same joy he feels – even if he’s making goofy jokes, faces and sounds about diarrhea in an ornate, old theater.

Read my full review of Pete Holmes: Faces and Sounds, via Decider.

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Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

The deceptive sophistication of Holmes’ technique never calls attention to itself, even as he weaves a consistently funny and varied hour-long set. Confessing late in the special that he’d just recently discovered how hard acting really is, Holmes diverts attention from what a fine and subtle comic actor he actually is on stage. Unafraid to let a bit build, seemingly to its breaking point and beyond, he rides some of his best anecdotes on the back of silent face-work. Whether mimicking his confusion that a musician he went to see hadn’t played his one big hit (having forgotten about encores), depicting a rapper patiently waiting in the recording booth for his cue to sing a chorus, or imagining a video-game actor warming up to spout authoritative snatches of nonsense dialogue (“Sonic boom!”), Holmes is a much better and more patient actor than he says he is.

Plenty of comics traffic in self-deprecation, but Holmes never really suggests that he’s anything but fine with who he is, which keeps his material from becoming gloomy or tiresome. In fact, Holmes positions himself as something of an ambassador for positivity, a conceit that could swing too far the other way into chipper innocuousness if he weren’t so silly about it. Badgering the human brain for being a “withholding piece of shit” by not letting people be happy all the time, Holmes’ exhortation to up your “joy quotient” by loving yourself “for what you are doing, not what you could be doing” would be cloying if his premise weren’t expressed in such eccentric ways. In consistently amusing anecdotes, Holmes takes on mundane topics—losing a parking space at Target, a rude barista, working up the courage to ask a cab driver not to do something really inappropriate while driving—from such a place of bemused wonder that the ordinary becomes irresistibly entertaining.

As much as he projects an easygoing storyteller vibe in much of his material, Holmes isn’t averse to elaborate wordplay, although he almost always calls attention to his own cleverness. Finishing up the story of that concert he attended with a funny/hacky one-liner, Holmes greets the expected wave of laughter with almost sheepish apology for going for a laugh other comics would kill for. Similarly, while he admits another, Star Wars-themed observational joke is lame, he absolves the audience, saying, “You are right to groan. That is a terrible joke, but it’s the only joke tonight that you’re gonna remember.” Holmes cracks up at his own jokes—again, something that could be off-putting if he weren’t so self-aware. Laughing along with his Chicago crowd over an observation (about a famously cool musician with the un-coolest name imaginable), Holmes extolls the virtue of the easy laugh, explaining, “That’s it. No twists or turns on that one.” Holmes wants people to laugh, damn it, responding to those who take perverse pride in being hard to amuse with a curt, “Yeah. Work on that.”

Hardly a squeaky-clean stand-up, Holmes delves into topics like sex, porn, and strip clubs along the way, that material deriving an additional layer of laughs both from how solid the jokes are and the perceived incongruity of this “silly, silly fun boy” (as he terms himself) being a fully functional sexual being. Holmes is capable of getting worked up over an issue—like stereotyped gender roles and homophobia—but his comic anger is expressed with equal parts generosity and creative detail that, like in his act as a whole, his takes emerge like good-natured, very funny common sense.

Why was the Pete Holmes show canceled?

Run and cancellation The show was broadcast Monday through Thursday on TBS at midnight in the United States. On May 23, 2014, TBS announced the cancellation of The Pete Holmes Show, citing insufficient audience numbers. The show's second and final season ended in June 2014.

Who is Pete Holmes married to?

Valerie Chaney

Is Pete Holmes related to John Ritter?

So, despite the resemblance between John and Pete, they don't appear to be related. However, both of the actors have been successful and are equally hilarious in their own right.

How old is Pete Holmes?

44 years (March 30, 1979)Pete Holmes / Agenull