Former Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson recently spoke about how he felt like a “loser” when the show played pranks at his expense. The comedian joined the hit NBC television show in 2014 at the age of 20, becoming one of the youngest cast members in the show’s history. It stayed for seven seasons until its release in 2022. Although Davidson has proven to be a popular addition to Saturday Night Live, his many famous relationships with celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley and Kim Kardashian among others, made it a national reference point.
During Jon Bernthal’s podcast, Real Ones, (via People), Davidson talked about Saturday Night Live making fun of him and how it made him feel bad. Though he praised show creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, Davidson said he felt like a “fucking loser” after a moment in which the show took aim at the comedian’s personal life. Here is what Davidson said:
“When your own show (makes irony on you), I was sitting in the back watching the cold open, and the cold open (is) political satire, whatever is in the culture. And then, making fun of you. Then you have to go out and do a sketch afterward and do your homework and the show just made a fool of you. So why should they laugh at you? Like, they just vilified you in front of everyone… And you’re like, “I’m a fucking loser, man.” These are the people I’ve been with for almost a decade. I grew up around these people. They have watched me through the most difficult period of my life, and have been there for me. And no one has shown me more grace and grace than Lorne Michaels, and I owe my life to that guy, but he was fucking confused because the nature of show business is the nature of this business. At the end of the day, it is what it is. This thing was really hard to do. You feel small. You feel super insecure.”
Originally broadcast in 1975, Saturday Night Live has amassed many incidents and controversies that have left many unsatisfied. Former cast member, Eddie Murphy left the show in 1984 to pursue a film career. However, it took decades for the actor-comedian to host the show in 2019. His long absence is directly attributable to a grudge over a David Spade heavy-handed joke that took aim at Murphy’s stalled career in the mid-’00s 90.
Late comedian Norm Macdonald was famously removed from the desk of “Weekend Update” following a string of OJ Simpson jokes during the former athlete’s high-profile murder trial. With Simpson being friends with NBC West Coast chairman Don Ohlmeyer, the executive took action against the comedian after several attempts to tone it down in the material. However, the comedian soon walked out of the show in protest when Ohlmeyer demanded Macdonald fire his writing partner Jim Downey.
While it’s not unusual for Saturday Night Live to make jokes about one of its members, as the show has been self-deprecating since its inception, the irony about a cast member’s personal life may have been too much. Davidson has used the show to joke about her past relationships, taking aim at the brief romance with Grande, but the humor came from her own personal experience of her. With Saturday Night Live showing no signs of stopping in the foreseeable future, audiences can surely look forward to future controversy.