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Caloroga Shark Media. Happy Easter. I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News, a daily briefing on stand up comedy comedians in the comedy industry. Pete Holmes talk to The La Times about a perfect Sunday in Los Angeles. Pete Holmes tells us here’s what you do.
At eight am. You visit a coffee shop with a sense of humor. Pete says, I like drinking espresso by itself. Val likes oat milk lattes, and his daughter would get a steam milk because she wants to feel like grown up. It’s very cute.
Then at ten am, you go read at least seven children’s books at Skylight. He says, I can tell you from experience. They’re incredibly generous with allowing you to read your kids seven books without any trouble. On principle, I’ll buy at least one of the books on the way out, because that’s exactly what people are talking about when they’re like shop local. Then at eleven you drink a terrible dark green juice.
He says. We’ll walk to punch Bowl and I get a terrible dark green juice that nobody wants. It would make a goat go blind. I love it because I’m forty six now and I eat almost exclusively for how It’s going to make me feel so very uncool, But that’s what I’m doing. My wife and daughter are going to get a smoothie called the honey Bee, which is very sweet and delicious.
Then at noon, you get a pancake for the table at Kitchen Mouse. He said, it’s really hip. The last time I was there, ran into Phoebe Bridger’s. Literally, rock stars are at Kitchen Mouse, and there’s a little kids area where my daughter can play with a little fake hamburger and a child she just met. I get the same thing every time.
The breakfast sandwich had a snicker Doodle pancake for the table. If you and I went to breakfast together, I would never ask do you want a pancake for the table? Because I don’t need you to be my accomplice. I know you want a pancake for the table because guess who wants pancakes everyone. This is going to reverse the juice that I just had earlier, but it’s going to be worth it.
At two o’clock, you eat an angry Samoa donut at the park it sounds like I can hang out with Pete Holmes. We’ve already had coffee, a smoothie, a pancake, and now a donut. Are we gonna get ice cream later? And this sounds awesome? Hete says.
We take a walk to Donut Friend and eat the donuts of the little park nearby. The park has giant bugs and it’s tube slide when you’re forty six and have kids sitting down as your heroin not to keep mentioning veganism, but Donut Friend has a really good vegan donuts. You gotta get the Angry Samoa, which is a girl Scalp cookie. My wife she comes by and she’s like, hey, I got your Girl Scout cookies. And I’m like, did you get twenty boxes?
She’s like, no, I got one box of samoas last I don’t know, two Knicks games, maybe three. Come on. One year I ordered the Girl Scout cookies that I ordered twenty boxes. She made the March Simpson face, as I like to call it. They did last the bulk of the year.
Maybe it was too many, I digress. Pete Holmes said, I once went a Donut Friend when I was tripping on LSD. I think it might have been my birthday, and I was coming down not a crazy person. I just couldn’t believe there was another person standing there with all the donuts in the world. It felt so overwhelmingly lovely that they were, like, which donut can I give you?
I was just floored by the generosity. I was probably making an ass of myself, like laughing in that sort of hippie way, not I get a drunk way, but like a benevolent alien who couldn’t believe that this planet had donuts. They gave me one, and I wish I could have seen myself eating it. Four o’clock. You feel fancy at the Huntington.
Now, he didn’t explain what the Huntington is, and I’m from New york’ so I have to look this up now. Obviously he means the Huntington Library, art Museum, and botanical gardens see New Yorker. I don’t know these things. I wanna play that game, Pete, all right, meet me at the Apple. Pete also says we’ll stop at the Chinese Garden get noodles there, because every step of the way there’s this constant eating seven pm vegan food.
Done right. He says, if we’re just Valerie and I, I’d go to the Crossroads Kitchen. I love it to death. When the pandemic happened, they would text us and ask if if we were okay, and if we needed food. We were like, what do you got?
And the manager brought it over. At nine o’clock, you go see whatever’s playing at Largo. At eleven o’clock, you eat at Norms. How much food are we having, Pete Holmes. He says, you get a milkshake, or you get some fries.
It’s open twenty four hours. I think La gets a bad rap for not having diners. Granted, in New York, they’re everywhere. It doesn’t matter what time we get home. We have to watch at least one episode of something thirty rock or right now we’re watching Black Rabbit.
It’s a busy day. Jerry Seinfeld n Apergasey spoke together in Forbest. Jerry said to hey, you told me you were having trouble getting pasted an hour. He had a sixteen minute barrier. Nate said, I think about it every day every show.
I’ve got myself to sixty two sixty three, I’m there. I’ve had that one at like sixty eight. I like to think I keep it tight. I can add stuff to make it longer. Your timing’s based on the audience.
You can do a sixty minute set in a corporate setting and do sixty minutes of a material in fifteen and it can go vice versa. Sounds like teaching. If I have a good class, I’ll leave class when it’s over and have an hour of stuff left.
And then when I have a bad class, two and a half hours of material shrinks do…
So I guess teaching college is like corporate work. Jerry was like, why do you still do corporate work? Nate said, it’s not a ton, but you know, Nate said, why do you go out every week? Your schedule’s been in this dude, I’ve been trying to get you to come out and hang with me one weekend, and every weekend I look at you. You work everywhere.
Jerry said, it’s the most fun thing I have in life. I find everything else is kind of okay, but working on a bit and hanging out with a comedian and I love hotel rooms. Well, Jerry probably stays in pretty nice hotel rooms.
And then I think about that a little more.
Jerry said, it’s such a guy last night he was a surfer. He was older and surfs every day. I thought, but if I could have done that and just been a surfer, because nobody knows you’re doing it, Nobody really cares if you’re doing it well or not. Just this thing you love. I think stand up and surfing are similar, and that the ocean is always stronger than you.
The audience is way stronger than you. But for the short period of time, I’m going to do a dance in this wave, and that’s what stand up is. I look at surfers. That’s the only way of life I envy or admire, just you and that energy. Nate said, I think golf is like that.
Golfers at the same schedules as us. They’re like a Thursday to Sunday schedule. Those guys get on the road, they drive through these things, see if they can make any money doing it. It’s a pure love of it, you understand. It becomes a mentality more than anything, where you got to be able to just handle it.
Jerry was curious, Nate, would you have been a golfer if you could have? Nate said, yeah, would have loved it. I mean, I love stand up too much. I love it. Jerry said, love is while you’re so good, people always ask me why do you keep doing it?
That’s the only answer. It just love of it. I have a new bit about golf about how they realize the game is too big, if we need a car to get around. Then somebody said, well what if we miniaturize it? What if we take this whole thing and miniaturize it.
See, that’s already a funny premise. Then Nate worked on the bit and said, well, now you date it too much because it’s like a mini golf. There’s got to be a middle ground. Where do you go? I’d like to walk a little bit.
I mean it should be in a parking lot where you’re walking ten feet. Jerry said, that’s funny. We’re gonna miniatureize. We’re going to miniatureize the pencils. Joe Coy and Gabe Iglesias are friends.
They were calling the time. Joe Cooy turned to Gabe down. Gabe says, remember when I was gonna take you on the road, And he said, no, how dare you any joint interview, the topic of playing Rhoda came up Gabe made the point, I’m willing to play by the rules. Want to do a corporate event here in America. Don’t make fun of Google, don’t talk about the CEO, don’t talk about his shoes, don’t make fun of his wife.
There’s always rules no matter where you go. Since it’s he stere, Let’s catch up with Jim Brewer, who spoke to The Advocate and said he put out a series called Funny How God Works. It’s on YouTube. They’re very powerful stories, healing and stuff like that, and all true stories. Jim talked about his podcast, said, when I first started it, I hit more with what I call the noise, and to me, the noises news and politics and your face and all that.
Then after a while, it’s extremely exhausting and it never feels good. It’s all energy to distract us from the everyday importance of talking to someone you love, helping someone helping a neighbor. At the end of the day, if I’m here to help you, I don’t care what you’ve voted for. I feel it’s way more important than these times for us to get as united as quickly as possible and to turn off that noise and realize They’re all bad. All of them are bad.
There’s no left right, there’s no Republican Democrat, just people taking our money and controlling our lives. They asked Jim about the physicality of his act. Is he worn out after a show? Jim said, always worn out. I’m so tired after show because I just put everything out there, and you know, twice it’s cost me some serious physical things where I blew my calf out on stage, I pulled hamstrings out on stage, I pulled my back out, I sprained my ankle on stage.
I just go all out. I can’t help it. I remember when I first went out on the road with Jim when he had the radio show, and he grabbed me and he said, look, I don’t want you to think I’m in a bad mood. Before the show. I go into the zone and I focus.
I’m not mad at you. I’m just gonna go quiet. And he explained after the show he’s tired. Don’t read anything into it. I was appreciated that he did that, because I could be paranoid at times.
Kathleen Madigan, can we teach a person to be funny? She told Psychology Today, you’re on for comedy news. No, not even close. If a person’s already kind of fun wanders into a comedy class, that may actually help them. But the idea that we could teach someone to be funny, I don’t think that’s true.
Psychology Today, asked Kathleen Madigan. Do you think humor helps people cope with life? She said, if you look at groups of comedians, it’s the underdogs, Black comedians, Jewish, Irish Catholics, Asians, they’re made fun of every day of their lives. As an Irish Catholic, I’m not sure we are made fun of every day of their lives. Kathleen may have had a different experience, perhaps just because she grew up in the West, I believe, and I grew up in New York City, where there’s a lot of Irish Catholics, or at least there were in the seventies and eighties.
I digress. Kathleen said, humor is a huge coping mechanism for wherever your people come from. There was nothing funny about the potato famine in Ireland, but somehow it ended up funny. My grandpa would say this thing about coping, which was one hundred years from now. Nobody’s going to know the difference.
He’s right, nothing really matters. He might as well have fun while you’re here. The Buddhists would say, let’s meditate to get to a higher plane, and we would say, yeah, no, let’s get to that higher plane with a shot of fireball. Psychology Today said it was fun talking with you. Kathleen said, well, no one wants to talk now.
In the old days, HBO people would come to the mill Rose Improv and you met them. They were alive, and then they went back to work in that building on Sunset Boulevard. Now the children have taken over. They like email. They just don’t want to talk at all.
For the Netflix show, I’ve never met or spoken to anyone, never been in their office. I used to go to New York and meet the Comedy Central people and then you’d audition. They tell you to your face, yes or no. Now you send a link and a form letter comes back, yes or no. That’s your comedy news for today.
See you tomorrow.