Pete Holmes

Pete Holmes
Born	Peter Benedict Holmes 3/30/1979
Birthplace	Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Comedian, actor, writer, producer, podcaster
Known for	The Pete Holmes Show, Crashing, You Made It Weird
Children	1
Website	peteholmes.com

Peter Benedict Holmes (born March 30, 1979) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, producer, and podcaster. He hosts the long-running interview podcast You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes, which launched in 2011, and created and starred in the semi-autobiographical HBO comedy series Crashing (2017–2019), produced with Judd Apatow. Holmes hosted the late-night talk show The Pete Holmes Show on TBS from 2013 to 2014 in the time slot following Conan, and has released a string of stand-up specials over the course of his career, including Impregnated with Wonder (2011), Nice Try, The Devil (2013), Faces and Sounds (2016), Dirty Clean (2018), I Am Not For Everyone (2023), and Silly Silly Fun Boy (2026). Holmes's comedy frequently draws on his upbringing in an evangelical Christian household, his subsequent shift toward a broader spiritual outlook, and his observations on relationships, marriage, and fatherhood.

Early Life

Holmes was born Peter Benedict Holmes on March 30, 1979, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised in an evangelical Christian household, and the religion of his upbringing has remained a recurring subject in his comedy and in the long-form conversations he conducts on his podcast. Holmes has discussed at length in interviews and on his podcast how the certainties of his early religious life were destabilized in his twenties, particularly following the end of his first marriage, and how that process pushed him toward a more exploratory, syncretic approach to spirituality drawn from sources including Christian mysticism and Eastern religion.

Holmes has cited his early exposure to mainstream American stand-up — and in particular the work of late-night comedians — as a formative influence, and his television career has been closely tied to one of those figures, Conan O'Brien, who became an early champion of Holmes's stand-up.

Career

Stand-up beginnings

Holmes began performing stand-up comedy in 2001. Over the course of the 2000s he developed a club act and worked his way into late-night television showcases. His half-hour Comedy Central Presents special, Impregnated with Wonder, was released in 2011, and helped establish his profile as a comic working in an upbeat, observational, conversational mode. He became a recurring guest on Conan on TBS, where his appearances — including segments on subjects such as expectant fathers — helped consolidate a working relationship with O'Brien and his production company, Conaco.

Holmes also worked as a writer and voice performer during this period, contributing voice work to commercial campaigns and animated projects. He was profiled in The Wall Street Journal in 2011 in connection with his voice-over work on the long-running E-Trade "talking baby" commercial campaign.

You Made It Weird podcast

In October 2011, Holmes launched You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes, a long-form interview podcast distributed initially through the Nerdist network. The program is structured around freewheeling, often multi-hour conversations with guests — primarily other comedians, but also actors, writers, scientists, and theologians — built around three topical pillars Holmes has described as comedy, sex, and God. The podcast has continued on a regular release schedule since its debut and has become one of the central platforms through which Holmes is known.

The Pete Holmes Show

In February 2013, TBS ordered The Pete Holmes Show, a late-night half-hour talk and comedy program executive produced by Conan O'Brien and Jeff Ross through Conaco. The series was developed as a companion to Conan and was scheduled to air in the time slot immediately following it. The program premiered later in 2013 and combined monologue material, sketch comedy, and guest interviews. Stand-up comic Gabe Liedman has been credited as the first stand-up performer to appear on the show.

The show ran for two seasons before TBS canceled it in May 2014. In subsequent interviews, Holmes has characterized the experience as a useful and difficult education in the demands of late-night production and as a turning point that pushed him back toward stand-up and toward developing his own scripted television project.

Crashing

After the cancellation of his TBS series, Holmes developed a half-hour scripted comedy with Judd Apatow for HBO, drawing on his own experiences as a young, religiously raised stand-up comedian whose first marriage ended in divorce. The resulting series, Crashing, premiered on HBO in February 2017, with Holmes starring as a fictionalized version of himself navigating the New York comedy scene while couch-surfing with established comics, who appear in guest roles as themselves.

HBO renewed Crashing for a second season in February 2017 shortly after its premiere. The series ran for three seasons before concluding in 2019. In interviews around the show's launch, Holmes described it as a portrait of a younger version of himself — earnest, evangelical, and unprepared for the realities of professional comedy and a collapsing marriage — and as a means of using stand-up's "open mic" world as a stage for questions about faith, ambition, and identity.

Specials and continued stand-up

Alongside his television work, Holmes has continued to tour as a stand-up and to release feature-length specials at regular intervals. His specials include Impregnated with Wonder (2011), Nice Try, The Devil (2013), Faces and Sounds (2016), Dirty Clean (2018), and I Am Not For Everyone (2023). In February 2026, he released Silly Silly Fun Boy through 800 Pound Gorilla Media; the special blends absurdist material with parenting stories and reflections drawn from his ongoing interest in religion and philosophy.

In 2026, Holmes toured nationally with the "Here and Now Tour," which included a one-night engagement in Aspen, Colorado, in June of that year. He has also performed at charity events, including the 14th Annual Stand Up for Brain Cancer gala held by the Broach Foundation for Brain Cancer Research at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas.

Voice work and other television

Holmes is a frequent voice actor. He provided the voice of the E-Trade "talking baby" in the company's long-running television commercial campaign, work that he discussed in a 2011 Wall Street Journal profile. Following Crashing, he starred in the 2022 CBS sitcom How We Roll, a network comedy based loosely on the life of professional bowler Tom Smallwood. He has remained a recurring guest on Conan and on other late-night programs throughout his career.

Personal Life

Holmes has spoken publicly and at length about his first marriage, which ended in divorce in his twenties and which became central to the dramatic material of Crashing. He has described the end of that marriage as a turning point in his comedy and in his religious thinking. He subsequently married comedian and musician Valerie Chaney, with whom he has a daughter; he has discussed family life, marriage, and parenting in his stand-up and in interviews.

Holmes has described his current religious and philosophical outlook as shaped by his evangelical upbringing but no longer bound by it, drawing on a range of contemplative and mystical traditions. These themes recur both in his stand-up specials and as the substantive backbone of many You Made It Weird episodes.

Recognition

Holmes's work has been profiled by outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Variety, Deadline, IndieWire, VICE, and The A.V. Club. The Pete Holmes Show was developed and ordered by TBS specifically as the late-night companion to Conan, a placement that reflected O'Brien's public advocacy for Holmes's stand-up. Crashing was renewed by HBO for a second season within weeks of its 2017 premiere, and ran for three seasons on the network.

You Made It Weird has become one of the longer-running interview podcasts in American comedy, in continuous release since 2011, and has functioned as a platform on which Holmes has hosted extended conversations with figures including Ray Romano and a long roster of stand-up comedians. Holmes is also catalogued in international authority files for creative figures, including VIAF and MusicBrainz.

Legacy

Holmes occupies a particular niche in American comedy of the 2010s and 2020s, in which his work as a podcaster, late-night host, scripted-television creator, and touring stand-up have been mutually reinforcing rather than separate. You Made It Weird, launched in 2011, helped establish the format of the multi-hour, philosophically inclined comedian interview podcast, in which the conversation moves freely between craft, biography, sexuality, and religion.

Crashing extended that sensibility into scripted television. The series's portrait of the New York open-mic ecosystem — in which working comedians appear as fictionalized versions of themselves and host an aspiring younger comic on their couches — drew on a tradition of comedy-about-comedy programming and remains one of the more sustained television depictions of life inside the contemporary American stand-up circuit. Holmes has framed the series, in interviews, as an attempt to render in dramatic form the collision between his evangelical upbringing and the realities of life in comedy.

His television career has also reflected the durable patronage of Conan O'Brien, whose production company developed The Pete Holmes Show for TBS and whose program has remained a regular stage for Holmes's stand-up. Across stand-up specials released over more than a decade — from Impregnated with Wonder in 2011 through Silly Silly Fun Boy in 2026 — Holmes has maintained a recognizable comic voice built around enthusiasm, religious and philosophical curiosity, and material drawn from his own marriages, divorce, and fatherhood.