Your bag is empty.
“That’s the actual background from my old talk show,” Pete Holmes tells Playboy as he gestures behind his couch. It’s where a crude cardboard cut-out of what’s supposed to be the Los Angeles skyline—but could realistically be any small to medium-sized city in America—sits. Holmes’ most loyal fans might recognize the prop as the backdrop from the short-lived The Pete Holmes Show, which was axed by TBS in 2014 after just two seasons. I joke that he should put it on eBay and maybe make a few bucks. “Hey, if they come pick it up, they can have it for free.”
It’s not that Holmes isn’t sentimental, as anyone who watched Crashing can attest. Loosely based on his early years as a comedian, the series had a surprising amount of warmth and heart for a show about the cutthroat world of open-mic stand-up. When I sat down with Holmes in a kind of makeshift man cave in the backyard of his modest Los Feliz bungalow, it had been just over a month since HBO announced that Crashing’s third season would be its last. If he was bummed about the decision—which admittedly caught him off guard—he certainly wasn’t showing it.
Quite the contrary, actually. Dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt and what could best described as pajama pants, Holmes is both welcoming and cheery—not exactly the disposition of someone who essentially just lost his dream job. Maybe it’s because he’s satisfied with how the show ended. Or maybe it’s because he’s busy taking care of his infant daughter. Or maybe it’s because over the years, Holmes has adopted a kind of stoic, all-encompassing worldview that treats things like success, failure, love and abandonment as constructs that are part of the same journey.
Perhaps the best way to understand how Holmes has arrived at a place of peace is by reading his brand new memoir, Comedy Sex God, which he wrote on and off over the course of three years. If Crashing and Holmes’ weekly podcast, You Made It Weird, are deep dives into Holmes’ outward persona and his inner psyche, then Comedy Sex God is a full-on archaeological excavation.
In it, Holmes charts his love-hate and on-again, off-again relationship with his faith in painstaking detail. From his early upbringing as a churchgoing evangelical, and the shame he felt while pursuing his burgeoning sexuality, to the divorce that led to his brief hiatus from God and everything it unlocked (shrooms, threesomes and more shrooms), Holmes provides the blueprint that guided a new kind of spiritual awakening. Here he is on his early experiences with Playboy, his lifelong friendship with John Mulaney and how to have the best mushroom trip ever.
About your book’s title, are you listing the three topics that you chose to focus on, or are you calling yourself a comedy sex god?
My editor and I were tickled at the idea that people might think that it was the latter. If you’ve read the book, you know that most of the sex in the book is with myself, so by no means am I calling myself a sex god. When we started my podcast, You Made It Weird, it covered those three ideas—comedy, sex and God. So my first idea was to write a trilogy of books, but the problem is, I really only care deeply about spiritual stuff, so I wanted to jump to that. I couldn’t wait to write two books to get to the god part. So I just decided to call it Comedy Sex God.
But also, sex and God were so closely entwined. I was never tempted to lie or steal or hurt people or be an asshole. I grew up a very sweet kid and just had a naturally occurring sense of shame, guilt, wanting to be liked and wanting to fit in. So all of Christianity locked in with me pretty intuitively. I wanted to be a good boy, and this is the good-boy club. And then you tie that into some sort of heavenly meaning, and that was nice for me. But then when puberty hits, sex becomes this biological urge, and it’s fucked up to tell children to suppress it, which is deeply unhealthy. Believe it or not, I left a lot of stories out of the book about jerking off because there were just so many.
“Three-ways were really interesting puzzles for my brain because I didn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Everyone masturbates, but very few of us will talk about it in the open so earnestly, the way you do in the book.
I thought it was important. The medium is the message in that one. I’m trying to say that you are loved as you are. That’s a great message. We can tie that to a diety or a symbol system. It doesn’t really matter. I’m trying to say that you are a part of the natural flow of the universe, and sex is a part of that. I have a joke right now where I say the universe is itself erotic. It’s attracted to itself. It’s called the Big Bang, for fuck’s sake! It’s not polite. It’s ejaculatory. It’s this huge explosive orgasm that we are a part of, and through wrong interpretations of a few Bible verses and some good old-fashioned puritanical Western shame, we’ve sort of lost the narrative. So to show that I want people to feel OK by themselves, I’m trying to demonstrate that by saying, “I’m not embarrassed.”
A lot of what you write about is deeply personal stuff that would be embarrassing for most people. How did you get to a place where you can be so open and earnest about your past experiences?
I share those types of stories on my podcast as well. It comes out on Wednesdays, and usually on Tuesdays in the middle of the night when I get up to pee, some flash of panic will come out, like “What did I say? Is it OK? Will people still accept me?” It’s a very base thought, the idea of, Will I be rejected from the group, or humanity, for what I said? It was just through practice. It was never natural. I wasn’t good at it right away. It was just a slow gas leak of vulnerabilities over the years. So when I did the book, I had enough practice seeing that it was typically OK to be honest.
It feels like the exact opposite happened. Instead of being rejected, you were embraced by people who could see some part of themselves in you.
Totally. Especially about this stuff. My friend Michael Gungor wrote a book called This, and it’s no surprise that he talks about jerking off, too. Growing up, that’s what we were worked up about. In college, a friend and I found another friend’s journal. We shouldn’t have read it, but we were assholes, and on one of the pages, he said, “I sinned again today,” and we knew exactly what that meant. No one needed a codex to know. “Was he greedy that day?” No! We knew he jerked off. So to me, the whole arc of the story is heavily about sex. So if you were to do the signposts of the book, one is the shame of it, and really, really feeling bad and worried that the second coming was going to happen while I was pursuing my own cumming.
The second was when my wife left me, which is also a sexual thing. I didn’t put this in the book, but when my wife and I divorced, I put down that the reason for the divorce was abandonment because I didn’t want to tarnish her name and say that she had an affair. And I think Christians would totally understand that. You don’t want to Scarlet Letter your wife. You still care about her, even though she hurt you. So I put “abandonment.” That’s like the most Christian thing I’ve ever done. Even when it was thrown in my face, I couldn’t reconcile the idea that sex had broken us apart. I got married in large part to have sex, and it didn’t work. She had sex with somebody else, and she fell in love, and then I lost my faith, and what I did was, I tried to just indulge. I was like, Well, I’m going to send myself signals that sex is OK.
Playboy seems to have played a major part in your sexual awakening.
I was actually reading them as a kid, pre-masturbation. I was smelling the cologne script. But there was all this comedy stuff in it. There was a great interview with [David] Letterman. In one of them, there was a piece about female comedians, and they were posing in the magazine, but they were in clubs that 10 to 15 years later, I would be performing in. It was really fucking weird.
You have such a vivid photographic recollection of your youth. Is that just something that’s in your nature, or have you been scribbling things down your whole life just in case you were to write a book one day?
These things when I was young, especially the sex things, were so vivid to me. Finding a Playboy in my brother’s room was like finding a Bowie knife. It had the same sort of charge of danger, and it was eternal danger. It was real stakes. So adrenaline and memory are linked. That’s why we have a hard time forgetting car crashes and things like that.
You describe so vividly your experience with that Playboy calendar, which is something younger generations can’t really relate to because of how accessible porn is today. Do you think that’s a good thing?
I can only really speak for myself. I still try to limit how much online, hardcore streaming pornography I watch. Meaning, I find it beneficial for my well-being to police it. It’s like having a roll of cookie dough in your fridge. I don’t eat it every time I want. So even in a weird way, I’m kind of grateful for my churchy upbringing because it taught me some restraint. I wish it could’ve taught me that for its own sake, but it is a little bit complicated to teach that to a kid. Images are powerful, and watching endless facial GIFs is going to change the the way you look at people and the way you have sex. Erectile dysfunction is through the roof. But I wish religion could do it in a more holistic way, or a more honest way, or certainly a less fearful way. But saying that what we consume has an effect on our interior world is very important to me.
In the book, I buy the Playboy that I had in my bedroom, and by today’s standards, it’s so mild. If you want to just see 500 buttholes, just isolated buttholes, you can see that. It’s literally just lizard-brain stuff. It’s the same thing as just eating Doritos, while eating ice cream, while eating French fries. One of the things that I found to be true is that meeting our sense desires can be really fun. If I look at porn and jerk off, I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t feel great about it either. It’s not like a great use of my day. I quickly and thoughtlessly jerk off because I’m anxious. There’s eroticism, and then there’s the mass yielding to whatever it is your animal wants. What disturbs me is that oftentimes when we’re jerking off to porn, we’re actually angry or anxious. That’s not code for, “We hate women,” though I do think that’s going on there for some people.
Especially when you look at the kind of porn that a lot of people are watching. Most porn is submissive.
Milf is the no. 1 type of porn! We don’t need Freud and Jung to be alive to know what they would say. So we’re working out a lot of psychology that might be better served through talk therapy or psychoanalysis through these sort of passionless sessions. But I think eroticism can be really beautiful. You can jerk off in a glorious and present way.
Especially if it’s with your partner.
Absolutely. If you’re not comfortable doing that, you’re probably doing you’re relationship wrong, or you’re masturbating wrong. I stopped jerking off the other day because I realized I wasn’t horny. I was anxious.
Yeah, sometimes it’s a good way to break up the work day, especially when you’re on deadline.
It’s crazy that the thing as writers that we write with are also our porn machines. It’s a wonder that we can ever not do it. It’s just a quick tab away.
Can you talk to me a bit about your writing process for the book? Was it something that you were working on over the years, and how much did it overlap with your work on Crashing?
To anybody that’s writing a book, I highly recommend that before you sell it, you write a lot of it. I’ve been writing it for three years. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it except for spurts when weren’t shooting. And then when Crashing was canceled, I thought, Oh, good—now I can promote the book! Because if I was working on the show, I wouldn’t be doing this with you right now.
Well, that makes me happy that your show got canceled.
And I’m just happy that what is, is.
In the book, you talk a lot about your struggles with anxiety, but from what I’ve gathered, you were kind of at peace when Crashing got canceled. How did you get to the point where you were able to accept something like that?
It’s a deepening understanding of what life is about. Crashing was a love letter to change. I hate when people say things happen for a reason because usually people say that from an ego level, like “Oh, I lost my job, but everything happens for a reason. Now I have this better job.” That’s just story line stuff. You really have to identify with your base awareness, which is just what clicked on in your brain before all of this body grew around that. We don’t have to get metaphysical and call it a soul. I’m just saying you’re awareness. If you want to see it, go wake up my baby in the next room, and you’ll see something that is just being. She’s not thinking in words, she doesn’t identify with a country or a sports team or a gender or a family or anything. She’s just aware. So that’s who I think you really are.
At one point, you’re going to die. Did that happen for a reason? Well, from your soul’s perspective, even that has to do with the natural flow and unfolding of things. So when I say that my wife left me, and that led me to where I am today, I’m not saying it like my wife left me, and then I made a TV show about it. That’s just more nonsense. What happened was that pain pushed me out of my fundamentalism and into an exploration of deeper spiritual ideas that have helped me in a very real way cope with anxiety, but also find a hidden meaning and a game to play behind and within and throughout every living moment. That’s the juice and joy of life.
I’ve always said that I don’t believe in God, and I think that means that I don’t believe there’s an old man or woman hanging out on cloud, but when I do want something to happen or not to happen, I find myself asking someone for help. Does that mean I believe in God?
It’s not for me to say, and it’s not important. I really think what you believe and how you structure your thoughts is just more horseshit. I don’t think when you die someone’s gonna scan your brain for correct beliefs. I think it’s about merging with, and becoming conscious. I don’t know how else to really put it. Words sort of fail us here. The really interesting question for that is you say, “I was talking to myself.” Well, who is doing that? And who’s watching you do it? There was a part of you that was going, Oh, there I am asking God for help, but who is that? I would say that’s a piece of God. That’s a piece of awareness, and it’s base awareness. And it’s going, “Oh, Pete’s anxious,” or “I doubt today,” or “I feel it today.” But there’s an unchanging constant.
A lot of mystic people say it’s like the sky, and your thoughts and your feelings, including your prayers for intercession, are like clouds going through. But there’s a constant behind it. But I would see that as a piece of God talking to a concept of God. There’s a quote from the Kena Upanishad on my fridge. It says, “Not that which the eye can see, but that whereby the eye can see.” It’s not what you’re seeing—it’s with what you’re seeing. Another way of putting that is God is what’s looking out your eyes right now. It’s like a fountain undulating into itself. And your doubt and your inability to really come up with a perfect symbol system for the ineffable infinite—yeah, that sounds about right. It would be pretty fucking disappointing if you nailed it! Imagine we could stream God like we can porn, and we can just get off?
It’s supposed to be a mystery.
Fucking A!
Is it meant to be solved?
I think it’s meant to be danced. And the doubt and the uncertainty, man! If you’re really looking at yourself during a day, there’ll be a moment of huge existential doubt. It might only last an elevator ride, but be careful because there might be a deep moment of interconnectedness. That’s why I wrote about those three-ways. Those were really interesting puzzles for my brain because I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I wasn’t just trying to sell books. I’m not even proud of it. It’s not something I like to bring up at parties. If you haven’t had a three-way, it’s like someone asking you if you own your home. “Do you rent or own?” It’s not a fun question if you don’t own your home. So just kind of keep it to yourself. But the reason why I put it in there is there were these challenging moments when I took mushrooms, when I had a three-way or when I felt the oneness of meditation. They were all similar in the sense that I didn’t want anything other than what was. That’s what was crazy about the three-way. Even when you’re at Disneyland, you’re kind of like, “I could go for a beer right now.”
“Imagine if we could stream God like we can porn, and we can just get off? “
I know the feeling of FOMO very well.
That’s life! Should I waste my one coffee of the morning on this place? And that sucks! This is a Buddhist idea. These moments that can seem indulgent, and based on how I was raised, would’ve seemed hedonistic and immoral to have sex with someone you’re not married to, but two people you’re not married to, it was confusing that I found it to be beautiful and spiritual. Maybe no in the moment, but looking back, it felt like mushrooms. And when I realized that meditating felt like mushrooms, then meditating and a three-way are somewhat similar. And in these confusing moments, when you’re getting exactly what you want, the ego can experience peace. But for the most part, the peace that I found and the cure for my anxiety has been found from sitting back into the slot of the observer, and that’s what I’m sharing in the book.
It doesn’t really matter what you believe or even if my ability to articulate it or write about it is effective for you, if you can by whatever means step back to that part of yourself that is the part of you that’s noticing you’re praying and not being sure if you believe in anything. People are like, “Jesus gives me joy.” I believe that’s possible, but when I said that, I just meant that singing in church gave me a good feeling. I’m talking about a lasting, permanent, non-circumstantial irrational joy that has so much more to do with forgetting yourself than remembering how things are really going your way today. That joy is fucking bullshit, and I can break it by going, Yeah, you’re still going to die, you stupid dumbass. You know what I mean? You’re in a hot tub eating ambrosia—is that joy? Or is that more streaming pornography?
Does having that perspective mean it’s harder for you to experience joy when cool shit happens in your life?
I want to be fully honest. Do I feel satisfied, and do I chase more story line satisfaction? Absolutely. I love the juice of life. I work with it. I’m not a renunciate. I’m playing with it, and every day [my wife] Valerie and I are like, “What is this life? This is crazy.”
In the book, you paint a lovely picture of your early friendships with people like Kumail Nanjiani, Emily Gordon and John Mulaney. Did you know back then that they would go on to become some of the biggest comedy stars in the world?
I remember one night, me and Kumail and a couple other people at a table at this horrible bar doing a horrible open mic, but at the time, I was reading a book about the history of comedy about [Jerry] Seinfeld and Ray Romano and all these heroes of mine. I was looking around, and I had this out-of-body experience where I was like, “Guys, you realize that’s us. They’re going to write a book about us.” None of us were very good at this point. I was 22, and I remember getting the feeling that Kumail agreed with me. A comedian has to have the right amount of delusion. You want to be right in the middle of the bell curve. If you have too much, it’s a thing we call “laughter ears”—somebody who bombs and thinks they did well. That’s wrong. You should bomb and think that you were better than they gave you. I still do that.
You still bomb?
By my own standards. Especially if it’s a weird corporate show. I judge it on my lower-back sweat. I’m in a suit in some tropical location, and I’m like, “Did my back sweat?” That’s a bomb for me. Maybe they laughed, but my back sweated.
Do you think that talent just gravitates toward talent?
One of the biggest pieces of advice I give to young comedians is to surround yourself with people that you like and that inspire you. I tried to be John’s friend. I saw him, I liked him.
Did you try and pick him up in the same way you might try and pick up a woman?
One hundred percent. It was a nonsexual or romantic. I didn’t force it. It was over years. It was just like, “Be available. Be around.” If he was at the bar, I’d sit with him and chat. You play it cool. It was like picking up a friend. The people that I saw that were haters and nasty negative comedians always talking about what they were owed or who sucks, all of those people aren’t doing comedy anymore. People would give me grief about Crashing, like “People helping each other wasn’t my experience.” And I’d say, “Then get new friends,” because it was my experience, and it is my experience.
Does that mean you never experienced jealousy towards any of your colleagues?
When I dropped my SNL submission package off, Mulaney was upstairs writing, so of course I was jealous. It’s not always a nasty emotion. It just means, “Wow, that would be awesome! I wish I was doing that.”
You talk a lot about your experiences with mushrooms in the book, and all of your experiences seem to be pretty positive. Did you ever have any “bad trips,” and what advice do you have for making sure that doesn’t happen?
Maybe just one. It gives me comfort to know set and setting. “Set” is your interior setting, and “setting” is where you are. So yeah, I have a lot of guidelines for mushrooms. I like to have a day before that I’m doing nothing. Don’t be on your phone. Read, fill yourself with good music. It’s a three-day system. One day, you’re just prepping; one day, you’re doing them, ideally with people that you love, people that you’re comfortable crying in front of and throwing up in front of. Those are the guidelines. Would you be embarrassed if this person heard you fart? Don’t take mushrooms with them. You don’t feel safe. You don’t know it, but you don’t feel safe, and you kind of don’t trust them.
Mushrooms are that weird thing you’ll take with people, and you’ll know like, “Steve is a bad guy. But Adam, he’s alright.” You’ll just feel it. And then you want a day off, ideally in the same place, where you don’t have anything that day. When you’re tripping, and you start going deep, you don’t want to think like, “I have work tomorrow.” You want think, “I have nothing tomorrow,” so you can really melt into the experience. And then making sure that it’s pure shit is super important. There’s a chapter in the book called “Yes, Thank You,” and that’s a good mantra for life. It’s basically a way of loving and not resisting life. And that’s what mushrooms are to me. Can you have something happen that’s strange or unwanted and say, “Yes, thank you.”
So when I had a bad trip in high school, and I hallucinated cars turning into giant spiders, I should have just accepted it.
I totally sympathize. I’ve had that experience before, and I knew that technique, and I’m not saying it’s easy. Somebody said about mushrooms, “If you think you’re going to die, just die.” Don’t resist anything because you’re not going to die. But go with it, and say, “Well, I guess I’m dead,” and just be a spirit. Trying not to have sex or jerk off a couple days beforehand is a real thing, too, and also eating clean. I had a bad trip, and I ate In-N-Out before, and in a very hippie way, it didn’t seem right. But in the end, it’s all about not resisting.
Forget having a good mushroom trip. Having a good life is trying to not tell yourself a story of resistance in your head. You were resisting giant car-spiders, which I totally understand. But we’re all resisting a delayed flight. What can you do about that is try to look at it from a depersonalized place, a place of acceptance. I don’t care what symbol system or diety you subscribe to. If you practice saying yes to what is, you’ll have a better life starting now.