When Ricky Gervais wanted to talk about participating in Make-A-Wish for his Netflix special Armageddon, he couldn’t help himself but share his most wicked impulse to chew out dying kids by sending them videos asking: “Why didn’t you wish to get better? What, are you fucking retarded as well?”
But when Pete Davidson jokes about helping Make-A-Wish in his new Netflix special out today, Turbo Fonzarelli, his own horrible thoughts turn inward, insisting that “by the way, not getting a lot of offers.” He adds, “Believe it or not, it’s not a lot of people’s dying wish to meet me. It’s usually their wish for me to die, actually.”
The roasting, or rather the self-immolation, continues as Davidson remarks he’d visit dying kids because, “yeah, I just drove into a house, I could use good press.” He tags a bit about how only pedophiles would want to spend three hours with kids who aren’t dying by casually admitting, “I was molested so I can make those jokes.” And then he suggests he could tell a Make-A-Wish kid all of his secrets because they wouldn’t have the time to blab to The Daily Mail like he suspects one of his actual therapists did.
How much of that is true? It might not matter to many, because we believe Davidson implicitly. We’ve seen all of the tabloid headlines, heard all the hot goss about him and his dating life.
Does Pete joke about Kim Kardashian or mention any of his famous girlfriends—former or present—in this special? No. But he was under no obligation to talk about his dating life. Instead he spends several minutes talking about a woman who imagined she was his lover.
“It’s been a very sad year. I lost my stalker,” he jokes, before explaining how—no thanks to his mom but very much thanks to his childhood chum, “Officer Tasty”—he eventually got his stalker arrested only to learn the court deemed her unfit to stand trial. This worries the comic, because sending his stalker to an institution for rehab gave her an even better chance of running into him again!
Davidson also jokes and later cops to making up a postscript in which his stalker had become a Jack Harlow fan (“I just made that up for hilarity,” he says, perhaps in a nod to last year’s Hasan Minhaj “scandal”). But he seemed not to be joking so much when he added, “If you become a Matt Rife fan, I’ll fucking kill myself, I swear to God.” (Rife previously had to apologize for telling Davidson to “run” from his ex-girlfriend Kate Beckinsale.)
When we talk about separating the art from the artist, we’re usually preoccupied with bad men who make great art. Perhaps Pablo Picasso or Roman Polanski comes to mind. Or Michael Jackson and R. Kelly. In comedy, you cannot utter names like Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, or Louis C.K. without experiencing blowback from their defenders who will insist those comedians did nothing wrong.
But how do we handle comedians or performers for whom we’ve somehow already separated their art from them and discarded it from discussion?
When Netflix posts its viewing metrics next week, neither Davidson, Gervais or Dave Chappelle will likely prove as popular in 2024 as what’s already proven to be the year’s most shocking “comedy special”—that three-hour Katt Williams sermon delivered directly to retired NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe. With upward of 38 million views on YouTube in its first six days, plus countless clips on TikTok and Instagram breaking down each Williams takedown, and every comedian Katt called out and then some coming out of the woodwork to attempt rebuttals, you’d almost hope it might get some of them to check out the actual stand-up catalog of Williams.
Particularly for comedians such as Davidson and Williams, we only seem interested in what they do off stage, and whether they might say anything on stage about their exploits off of it.
Williams won an Emmy for his guest-starring role in Atlanta, but when is the last time anyone really paid attention to his 12 specials? His 2018 Netflix hour, Great America, landed on my Top 10 list that year, and I called his 2014 HBO special, Priceless: Afterlife, directed by Spike Lee, “the most important, timely stand-up special of 2014.” But that’s not most likely what popped into your head reading the words Katt Williams, and that’s because our collective image of him has been shaped much more by his offstage feuds and arrests.
Davidson had infamy pushed upon him while he was just a kid, being known first as the teenager in the New York City comedy clubs whose firefighter dad died on Sept. 11, 2001, a fact mined almost two decades later for Davidson’s self-autobiographical film directed by Judd Apatow, The King of Staten Island.
He spent most of his 20s growing up in front of us on live TV via Saturday Night Live, but outside of his recurring apathetic “Chad” character, you likely mostly remember him kissing Kardashian in an Aladdin sketch, being forced to apologize to Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) for a “Weekend Update” joke, or having to discuss his personal life from that desk. Ultimately, we don’t pay enough attention to his actual comedy.
Davidson has turned in charmingly goofy supporting roles in recent years on the big screen, too, from DCU flicks such as The Suicide Squad to dark indie satire such as Bodies Bodies Bodies to based-on-a-true-story Dumb Money. But you know who’s paying attention? Davidson’s fans.
They made his debut special, SMD, the fifth-most watched stand-up comedy special released on YouTube in 2023, amazing considering Comedy Central re-released the 2016 hour to YouTube last January, where it attracted more than 4.1 million views. Only Rife and Bill Burr captured more YouTubers attention with their 2023 output.
So instead of being able to rattle off Davidson’s list of celebrity girlfriends—or Williams’ criminal arrest history—perhaps we should be learning and spreading their jokes. When Davidson grabs the microphone and tells us what’s on his mind, perhaps we should truly listen to him. Or are we only hearing what we want to hear and disregarding anything that doesn’t capitalize on his public image?
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