Pete Lee was on the path to becoming a doctor when he got bit by the bug. The comedy bug.
Lee is coming to the Comedy Vault for shows at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 22 and 7 and 9:30 p.m. Aug. 23 and 24 in Batavia. Lee is known for his multiple appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and his standup clips on Instagram and TikTok.
“The Comedy Vault is a really special club. The owner, Liz (Valaitis), is really into comedy and she’s really great to comics,” he said. “Few of them love the comedians the way that Liz does.”
Lee grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, and started performing standup comedy while a junior on a pre-med route at the University of Minnesota, although he was interested in it long before.
“I had a grandmother that was a lounge singer and told jokes in between her sets,” he said. “I asked her for advice on jokes and what-not. At one point, my grandmother was teaching me the structure of jokes and she wouldn’t let me eat dinner until I wrote her a proper joke. That was when I was 14 years old.”
He changed his major to advertising, which taught him “how to write 200 of something to get to one thing that’s good,” he said.
If you’ve seen him on TikTok, you might see a lot of clips of him doing crowd work, but he says that’s really just a small part of his act.
“They should expect about three-quarters of the act will be material and probably about a quarter will be crowd work,” he said. “For a long time, I was known for being a good writer of material. I think my ‘Tonight Show’ appearances reflect that.
“But the way that the internet is going right now, you kind of have to release a video every day or every third day. If I was releasing all my material and when people came to the shows, they wouldn’t see anything new. I’m a trained improvisor as well and I really think it’s fun to talk to the crowd.”
He won’t ever disparage anyone either in his crowd work, he said. He loves it when people who have only seen him online doing crowd work come to see him.
“It’s a fun surprise for people, that they get a lot more material,” he said.
He talks about his marriage, he talks about his dog, he talks about drinking (“In the Midwest, drinking is funny”) and he talks about how much it sucks to be nice, he said.
“If you really look at the core of what I’m talking about, I never say that sentence onstage but I’m really talking about how much it sucks to be a kind person,” he said. “I talk about everything from calling customer service and how everything is automated. I do a whole section on young people. Everybody’s really hard on young people — they say it’s the worst generation. They’ve said that forever. I defend young people for about 10 minutes and it’s funny.”
His audiences tell him he’s very relatable.
“That’s what comedy is supposed to be,” he said. “You’re supposed to be holding up a mirror to people’s experiences so they can go, ‘I feel that way’ or ‘That made me feel better.’ If you’re giving out information or wisdom in a show, you want it to help people’s lives.”
Comedy has been his full-time job since 2003.
“It’s wild to me that I’ve kind of gotten away with this for so long,” he said. “When I started comedy, I just wanted to be able to not have a day job. It’s worked out so well; I’m able to make a living and go around and make people laugh. I would say I’m on the road two to three weekends every month. I try to have one weekend off so I can hang out with my wife and grill out and be a regular person.”
In 2008, he was a semifinalist on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” and starred in his own half-hour special on Comedy Central. In 2021, Lee released his first one-hour stand-up special, “Tall, Dark and Pleasant” on Showtime. Most recently, Lee voiced the lead character Lamb in the Emmy Award-winning series “Jam Van” on YouTube Kids, which co-stars Nicole Byer and Marc Maron.
He lived in New York City and California while he was building his career, but now resides in Scottsdale, Arizona. He loves being an hour-flight away from Los Angeles if he needs to go to auditions or meetings.
He loves the state of comedy now.
“It used to be that you needed to get a sitcom or be on a TV show that was popular enough to sell tickets to your shows,” he said. “Now, you can post videos online and do standup specials more readily. You can just be a standup comedian, which is all I wanted to do in the first place.
“I think standup comedy as an art form is getting way better in the last three, four, five years. The jokes I’m seeing are way better and this crop of comedians coming up are way better, because instead of them having to waste their time developing TV shows for networks that don’t go anywhere, they’re just focusing on standup. Standup as an art form is the best it’s ever been.”
People can expect to laugh and laugh hard at Lee’s shows, he said. He said he even drops the pace to give people a break.
“It’s going to feel really good and you’re going to laugh really hard,” he said. “I’m talking to people that think that they won’t and that’s the fun part.”
Annie Alleman is a freelance reporter for the Courier News.
Pete Lee
When: Aug. 22-24
Where: The Comedy Vault, 18 E. Wilson St., Batavia
Tickets: $25
Information: 630-454-4174; comedyvaultbatavia.com/events/93658
