Category: Entertainment

In the first two minutes of his new special “Silly Silly Fun Boy,” Pete Holmes quips about his “big, dumb Mormon face” (despite the fact that he is not Mormon) and admits to sticking Q-tips deep into his “ear G-spot” (despite the warnings on the package).

Right off the bat the humor is, as the title suggests, silly. But like with all of his sets, Holmes imbues wisdom in even the most juvenile of jokes. “It’s your resistance that creates the suffering,” he says later, sounding like a pull quote from a philosophy book. (It’s a punchline about pooping one’s pants while driving.)

Holmes has been a prominent name in stand-up for two decades now, and while his playful brand of comedy hasn’t changed, the “Crashing” creator and “You Made It Weird” host has seen the industry transform rapidly around him.

“It’s so funny how comedians have become little businessmen,” he tells Variety over the phone, driving across Los Angeles to a podcast appearance. “We’re supposed to be eating loaded potato skins and being drunk in a green room, and now we’re talking about long-term benefits as opposed to taking a big advance.”

Out March 24 at 5 p.m. PT, “Silly Silly Fun Boy” is Holmes’ sixth special and first to be released directly on YouTube, following a brief exclusive window on 800 Pound Gorilla. He’s explaining why the video streaming site has recently become a favorite distributor for comics, but a passing truck derails his train of thought into a nascent bit.

“Can we take a moment to appreciate that Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul have a mezcal together?” he asks, referring to the “Breaking Bad” duo’s brand Dos Hombres. “They had a show where they were drug dealers, and now they’re like, ‘Remember us? We’re the meth guys. Drink our mezcal!’”

“We’re so stupid,” Holmes says, cracking up. “We’re such a stupid group. ‘Hey, wanna get high? Remember? The people in their underwear cooking in a camper?’ We just don’t see alcohol as a drug. Anyway… what were we saying?”

I love a comedy special that drops you right into the set. How did you decide there wouldn’t be a walkout?

I haven’t been asked that before, and to be honest I kind of wanted to be asked, because there’s a lot of consideration that goes into making a special that often goes unnoticed. When I performed this hour, there’s probably 10 or 12 minutes before the first actual joke of the special. My wife is always like, “Pete, you could just skip this.” 

When it’s live, there’s more consideration around meeting the audience where they are — how are they feeling, what’s the vibe, all of that. But when you’re watching a special on TV, people are much more capable of just jumping in. So it wasn’t a fear-based decision — like “We have to start fast because nobody has an attention span” — it was more about how do we make this as lean as possible.

When taping a special, Bill Burr told me he enjoys picking crowds that will be a bit “hostile” toward him. What factors did you consider when picking Portland?

Bill — who’s one of my favorites — his ideal show is one where people actively disagree with him, because that’s his art. I’ve sat with my wife Valerie watching him do a joke where we both disagree with his point, and by the end we’re both laughing anyway. That really is his magic. My offering is a little different. I’m looking for crowds that are playful, silly and open — and it’s a real plus if they’re not just comedy-savvy, but live-performance-savvy in general. 

Brian Regan has this great quote I say all the time: “Comedians are like musicians, and their instrument is the audience.” So I’m not doing comedy at them — the sound I can make is 100% reliant on them. I’m looking for silliness and openness more than I’m looking for the uphill challenge. Portland is an incredibly liberal place, and I have some jokes about gender identity that I knew they’d be on board with. But I actually love doing those jokes in rooms where it’s a little iffy. So it’s not about aligning with them on every value.

You joke about how the type of people who are unwilling to use one’s preferred pronouns are the same people who would get mad if their truck was misidentified as a “car.” Was it different performing those gender jokes from city to city?

Yeah, it was. Every joke has something underneath it, and if there is a message, it’s that we do all sorts of things to accommodate people’s feelings. It was fun to do it in front of crowds where I sensed they might not be so sympathetic to the idea. I’ll tell you, the joke never got silence. It might have gotten a little tense, but more often it was actually the liberal crowds who’d get worried I was going somewhere offensive — because comedians tend to take the side of [mocking trans people].

When I’m doing a joke like that and I see genderfluid or queer people in the audience, I can feel that kinship beaming back at me. And that’s meaningful to me. It’s not why I started comedy, but after 25 years, I’m starting to see the potential of: We’re actually saying something. Even when we’re saying nothing, we’re saying something with our nothing.

Is it a trope now that every comedian has a trans joke?

Yeah. I think it’s directly because Chappelle made a lot of noise with his trans stuff. If you have a trans joke, it’s like having a Michael Jackson joke — it’s so well-trodden that you better make sure it’s good. It can’t just be a cheap laugh, because a lot of times the joke is really just being disrespectful or irreverent, which is by definition titillating — it’s shocking or upsetting, or you might find it hilarious. I didn’t feel like I had to do a trans joke, I just had something to say about it… even though it’s probably easier and safer to say nothing.

When you first started, were there any taboos in comedy that audiences have warmed up to in the years since?

The big thing for me is religion and spirituality. It’s been exciting for me that by just mentioning God, people don’t automatically assume you mean an old man in the sky who’s mad that you masturbate. It used to be if you said “I believe in God,” it meant you don’t say “fuck, shit, piss, cunt,” you don’t do drugs and you obscure your sexuality. Now it’s so wonderful to be able to say, “Can we talk about what we’re all doing here?” and not have anyone in the crowd bristle because the guy swears or acknowledges the existence of sex or psychedelics. I grew up in a time where there was comedy and there was faith comedy, music and faith music, and that line has been so delightfully blurred and has removed that taboo.

I want to ask about the business of comedy. In your HBO show “Crashing,” we see the humiliating lengths comics had to go in order to get just a couple minutes of stage time. These days, many young comics are skipping the club scene and building an audience online. Is the industry you came up in a bygone era? 

It is. When I made “Crashing,” I was talking to people older than me — Artie Lange, Bill Burr… that’s where the wisdom is. But if I was starting in the scene now, doing a 2020s version of the show, I’d be talking to people younger than me, like Gianmarco Soresi. He is a brilliant comedian who totally figured out YouTube. Not just how to market himself, but how to find his fans and build his base. And now he can tour. It’s incredible — not only can he tour, but he can actually make money just from the videos. I get so excited for young people because of that.

I’ll talk out of the other side of my face in a moment, but if you can skip going to a club called The Chuckle Conglomerate at some horrible rest stop where you make $300 eating shit in front of a crowd you shouldn’t even want to do well for, and instead just hone your craft, find your fans, and align with them, I think that’s beautiful. That’s what “Crashing” would have been about now: how do I make a TikTok, how do I get on YouTube, how do I release my own special? Look at Shane Gillis — he put his first special on YouTube and it goes viral because it’s good.

So to talk out of the other side of my face: I have appreciation for the way young comics are doing it, and I don’t think they’re missing out on anything. But I do think there’s a quality to letting the world test you — being a little frightened and then persevering, in whatever form that takes. There’s nothing like walking into a bar that smells like blood and beer and doing well. It toughens you up and builds muscle. I don’t think that’s unique to comedians; I think that’s what your 20s and 30s are for. Let’s go grow, let’s go be scared. 

And you can do both.

Comedians doing both are in the best position. Sorry to keep mentioning Gianmarco, but what he’s done with his YouTube is remarkable, and the guy tours, the guy does sets, he’s up there at one in the morning, he knows what it is to scrap. It’s good to do both: One is cardio and the other is weights, and you need both for a healthy artistic body.

Speaking of YouTube, this is your first special released on the platform. It seems like there used to be a stigma around YouTube, that it was where you went if you couldn’t sell your special to a network or streamer. But now some comedians are turning down offers from Netflix to release directly on YouTube.

The comics I talk to, including the younger ones, say there is Netflix and there is YouTube. That’s not to say you can’t have a special elsewhere — Roy Wood Jr. has a great Hulu special, and maybe my favorite special of all time, from Chris Fleming, is on HBO. But it’s like musicians with albums. They put out a record so they can tour. In the past, comedians have understandably gone for the payday. You make $100,000 to sell your special to Comedy Central or whatever. Now, you make your money touring, so you want to reach the largest number of people, and that’s why people are going to YouTube. But, you know, we submitted the special to Netflix and — my feelings aren’t hurt — they did pass. It gave us a moment to go, “OK, what is the path of most fans as opposed to the most money?”

As someone who hosted a late-night show, what do you think of the state of late-night? Is the format on its deathbed?

It’s so funny, I’m driving past Warner Bros. right now, which is where we filmed my talk show. I always drive by and remember parking there. It was such a sweet time of my life. Anyway, it’s so obviously podcasts. In one sense, everything’s changing, but in another sense, absolutely nothing is. I was just in New York promoting my kids’ book and this special, and I go to Barstool Sports, I go to all these podcasts — and they’re all talk shows. And then I did Colbert.

What we’re losing with Colbert is… I don’t put on a suit to do a podcast. Colbert is in the Ed Sullivan Theater, for fuck’s sake. It’s where Letterman was, where Ed Sullivan was. It’s got a band and a shiny floor and it’s on CBS. So on one hand I’m like “Nothing’s changing,” but it is valid to mourn the loss there. And the real loss isn’t people making jokes in a chair talking to a host. The real loss is the specialness. It’s like going to a fancy dinner where you dress up and there’s a maître d’ and a sommelier. You’re still just eating a meal, but the ritual and the history make it feel so much more special. That’s what’s being lost.

Do you have a dream guest for “You Made It Weird”?

I’d like to get Jim Carrey. I know he’s in the news for his red carpet thing, but that’s not why. I think he and I would have an interesting conversation about spirituality.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

After the first renditions of her Hannah Montana hits “This Is the Life” and “The Climb,” Miley Cyrus ruffled her period-perfect blonde bangs as she settled back into the character that launched her career. “I used to think of Hannah as something separate of myself,” she told the audience of 215 superfans who gathered at Sunset Gower Studios last month to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Disney’s “Hannah Montana” with a concert taping. “This special is my reclaiming of merging Hannah and Miley together.”

Cyrus had gathered her most devoted fans — so devoted, in fact, that several hopped on flights from Brazil and London with less than 24 hours’ notice — to honor the milestone that she referred to as her “Hannahversary.” (“I get so mad when people call this an anniversary,” she said.) It’s easy to forget that a superstar like Cyrus once worked in the Disney trenches as a teen actress with dreams of stardom: Over the past few decades, Cyrus has shed her skin anew as one of pop’s most magnetic stars, a true creature of reinvention who came of age in the public eye just as her TV character once had. For Cyrus, “Hannah Montana” wasn’t just a launching pad — it was also a parallel to her life being written in real time.

One fan in attendance, Jen, who came to the taping with two friends, took a broader view of the “Hannah Montana” curio: “It was great seeing someone do normal girl stuff,” she told me before the taping. “Living in Los Angeles is celebrity culture, and it showed that celebrities are real people. They’re still going through the same themes of family and friends as you are. The core is the things that you all go through.”

It’s why all these years later, the true “Hannah Montana” fans — the ones scoped out by event organizers who had online paper trails proving their devotion — descended on Hollywood to attend the concert taping portion of the special. The week prior, Cyrus had been spotted filming in full Hannah Montana regalia cruising Malibu, where her character lived, and had filmed a sit-down Q&A with true superfan and “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper, who watched the concert taping from the back of the room next to Cyrus’ mother Tish.

For the taping, fans had lined up as early as 5:30 a.m. to see their idol. This, they later explained in TikToks and X posts, was something they never thought would happen. Their lives were about to be changed.

Attendees were encouraged to dress in something inspired by Hannah Montana, and boy did they. Everywhere you looked, it was like a Limited Too exploded: coral dresses over magenta tights, butterfly clips, tiny scarves, even tinier handbags. Vintage t-shirts from early Hannah Montana tours. Cowboy boots as far as the eye could see — that is, if your Y2K sunglasses straight out of a J. Lo video weren’t too tinted. It was as though Hannah Montana’s coveted closet, which was recreated on the soundstage set, had become sentient and unionized on a Hollywood lot. At one point, as we waited in one of the many lines we endured, a girl named Ali gushed to her friend about spotting someone’s yellow zebra-print top and single pink glove: “It sent tingles down my spine.”

Dressing the part was a given. After all, these Hannah Montana fans wanted to be there. Badly. As we stood outside the studio, a woman named Gabriela told me that she had arrived from Brazil only an hour ago. She had gotten a text at 8 p.m. last night and was on a plane three hours later to Los Angeles. It was a nail-biter, she said, as her flight got delayed an additional three hours. Still, she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. “She’s everything I wanted to be,” she said, slipping off her jean jacket to reveal a bicep-length tattoo of Cyrus on the backside of her left arm. What exactly was it that had made her such a big fan? “The fact that she’s grown up with me. She’s so versatile. The fact that she’s always changing — it’s amazing to see.”

That was the unifying theme of everyone who had taken a Summer Friday in February (it was a piping 90+ degrees in Hollywood). These superfans connected with Hannah Montana in ways that two decades somehow couldn’t weaken. “Everyone says you should kill your inner child,” an attendee named Love told me. “But she would have loved this.” Love had driven with her friends Amy and Gabby to the lot, listening to Hannah Montana songs along the way. “It was an escape watching the show,” recalls Gabby. “I felt like I was in Malibu with her.”

To be a Cyrus fan, and on top of it a “Hannah Montana” fan, required unfettered allegiance. What came next put their fandom to the ultimate test: hours of waiting to be let into the soundstage, which felt, quite frankly, like a sanity check. Attendees congregated on the roof of a five-floor parking garage that, even at 10:15 a.m., felt like being locked in a tanning bed. Two small tents shaded those who got there earliest, leaving throngs of fans — the rest of us — to bake in the sun as security locked our phones in pouches. (It’s not unusual, it should be noted, that tapings make attendees wait and wait. That the production team behind this special didn’t account for an unseasonably hot day was an egregious error.)

Waiting became a standard of existence. What followed was an hour of mulling about the lot before we were moved to an empty windowless room divided by a chain-link fence. “I want to see how many lines we can go in before we get there,” said one male fan. “At least there’s air conditioning.” That was, until the A/C seemed to cut out somewhere around what felt like the 45-minute mark. It was a sobering lesson in our dependence on technology: without our phones, time didn’t exist.

Eventually, we were brought into the soundstage where a hype man impressively excelled in the thankless task of keeping the energy high. “Hannah Montana will be here in five minutes!” he vamped, making that same promise for what felt like every 10 minutes. It was somewhere around 1:30 p.m., I think, when Cyrus finally poked her head out from behind a curtain next to the stage. Finally, it was time, a moment 20 years in the making. What’s an extra three hours of waiting?

Cyrus, of course, was as vibrant as ever as she reinhabited Hannah Montana. The character seemed to come right back to her as she emerged from backstage with black shades and a black dress, clutching a gold-studded microphone. The taping itself was pretty standard as far as these things go: Cyrus sang “This Is the Life” and “The Climb” live twice before exiting the stage and reemerging to lip-sync the songs for a third time. “It’s a little confusing, huh?” she told the crowd as she killed time between performances. “Hybrid Hannah: a little bit of Hannah, a little bit of Miley.”

It was during this brief break that Cyrus seemed to take in the moment. “I was on the TV in [your] living room,” she said. “Everything we wrote, we got to be with you all in your homes… That’s what my character didn’t want to let go of.” She acknowledged the absurdity of the show’s premise — that slapping on a wig was such a transformation that no one in her school would realize she’s moonlighting as a pop star — with her signature wit. “Disney was the first to do drag on TV,” she quipped. After she lip-synced the songs for a third time, she appraised her own performance with a snappy reference to “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”: “Shantay, you stay.”

It was fitting, then, that choreographer Jamal Sims, a regular on “Drag Race,” was here to instruct fans on how to react to Cyrus’ third and final song, “Best of Both Worlds.” Producers handed out signs for fans to hold up during the performance that featured six backup dancers and a massive “Hannah Montana” marquee hung at the back of the stage. For each rendition, Cyrus emerged from a trap door in the stage and sang the “Hannah Montana” theme song, pretending to shred a guitar at just the right moment. Pyrotechnics flashed behind her. The gratification was immediate; tears glistened on fans’ cheeks as the lights pulsed on stage.

And with that came the last burst of confetti at the song’s final run-through. It was the end, the closing of a chapter that could very well have never been opened. It was time for Hannah Montana to go back into dormancy, forever minted in a Disney special. By then, it was 3:30 p.m., and no one really seemed to want it to end. That, it was clear, is the stuff that legends are made of.

Amazon MGM Studios’ Nicole Morganti, head of originals for Southern Europe, and Thomas Dubois, head of originals in France, took the stage at Series Mania Festival in Lille to discuss Prime Video’s ongoing strategy to lure more women and younger demos on the heels of the “Culpables” trilogy.

“We are much more female-centric. We are looking for women audience, all ages, and we are looking after women young adults,” said Morganti. The executive pointed out the company kicked off this strategy in Spain a while ago with the “Culpables” trilogy which was watched by 100 million people globally and was remade in in the U.K. as “My Fault.”

“We started to create a big pipeline in Spain about young adults, and we expanded to the rest of my region (in Southern Europe),” she said, adding that Prime Video recently successfully launched “Love Me Love Me” – based on Stefania S.’s Wattpad book that garnered 24 million reads — in Italy and has announced a second movie is on the way.

Morganti said collaborating with “Wattpad authors” has marked a turning point for the streamer as she noted, “Reading is getting back to be a huge trend.”

“Wattpad is a platform where a lot of young adults go and read (…) and there are fanbases over there, and those fanbases are very entitled about their book,” she said, adding that these partnerships have helped Prime Video to “understand the communities that are behind these IPs.”

After unveiling the first teaser for its upcoming teen series “Campus Drivers, ” Dubois said Prime Video was “open up to new genres” in the field of romances. Citing Sarah Rivens’ “Lakestone,” Dubois said, “It’s a dark romance book that has 26 million viewers on Wattpad that we’re going to adapt in France.”

“We want to try not to replicate the same show all the time because there’s also a limit at some point within this space. We want each show to have its own singularity, and to do so, we are getting into dark romance,” Dubois continued. He mentioned upcoming originals, such as a movie called “Tempête,” which he described as “a survivalist with a touch of romance out of our two main characters.”

“We’re not limited to high school shows that we do love and we have a few in the pipeline, but we also think that we need to be ahead of what our customers are going to expect from us, which is innovate also in that field,” he said.

Beyond romances, Morganti also talked about recent genre film hits on the streamer’s Southern Europe slate, such as “Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End,” a Spanish thriller movie directed by Carles Torrens which she said “went incredibly well around the world as 90% of the audience was outside of Spain.”

“Who would have thought that an apocalyptic zombie story coming from Spain could actually conquer the U.S. and the rest of the world,” she said.

Dubois, meanwhile, talked about leveling up Prime Video’s film output in France with “Masterplan,” a international heist movie directed by Thomas Vincent (“Reacher”), starring Stanley Tucci and Simona Tabasco (“The White Lotus“). The English-language production will mark Prime Video’s first French-Italian Original film and is produced by Gaumont, the French studio behind “Lupin.”

Rome’s emerging Frocinema film festival dedicated to queer cinema is raising its international profile having secured several big names for its upcoming third edition that will feature an extended program of film screenings, workshops and talks.

The event – touted by organizers as Rome’s first queer film festival – will kick off March 30 with Robin Campillo introducing his AIDS activist drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute)”; Céline Sciamma will be on hand for the Italian premiere of newly re-edited version of her celebrated feature “Tomboy” that premiered at Berlin, where she received an honorary Teddy Award; and Zackary Drucker will present the European premiere of her HBO doc “Enigma” about 1970s disco diva and trans icon Amanda Lear.

Bartholomew Sammut, senior programmer for the Berlinale’s Panorama section and the fest’s Teddy Award Coordinator, is also among expected guests.

The fest’s name, Frocinema, reflects the event’s “concept of [cultural] re-appropriation,” according to a statement that explained how the term ‘frocio’ (which can be translated in english as ‘faggot’) “has been used as an insult and which, through irony, is now being emptied of its discriminatory meaning and re-semantized, becoming a [queer] banner,” the statement said.

The Frocinema fest is organised by Italian actor, writer, and LGBTQIA+ activist Pietro Turano who serves as artistic director, working in tandem with Arcigay Roma the local branch of Europe’s LGBTQIA+ association Arcigay, and the Piccolo America nonprofit association, a feisty group of young film buffs who operate a state-of the-art movie theatre called Cinema Troisi in central Rome and run outdoor summer arenas in Rome’s Piazza San Cosimato and other spots. The event is supported by Italy’s Soka Gakkai Buddhist Institute. 

The fest also features a shorts’ film projects competition that this year is introducing a double prize: a €15,000 ($17,000) grant for production of a short fiction film and a €10,000 ($11,000) prize for the best short documentary project.

The extended event will have a grand finale on June 12, 2026 with a special outdoor event held in Piazza di San Cosimato featuring surprise guests to be announced in the coming weeks.