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Ever since his debut on Saturday Night Live, Pete Davidson has been one of the most talked-about comedians of his generation. From his early struggles on SNL, to his highly public personal life, to navigating the pressures of fame, Pete has faced more than his share of ups and downs. But early on in his tenure at Saturday Night Live things got so bad he actually went to creator Lorne Michaels and asked to be fired. Luckily Lorne said no, and the rest is history.
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I never imagined this would be my life, you know
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I mean, look at me when I started here. Like, back then, I was just like a skinny kid, and no one knew what race I was
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It's not often in life that we encounter a person who actively wants to lose their job
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And that's especially true when that job represents the fulfillment of that person's
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lifelong dream and comes with a near guarantee of wealth and fame
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But while it's hard to imagine, it does happen. Take, for example, Pete Davidson, a comedian and actor who made it all the way to the pinnacle
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of his profession, the cast of NBC's Saturday Night Live, and then, after just one season
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went to Lorne Michaels and asked to be fired. So are you officially leaving? Yeah, man
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Lorne accidentally gifted me a sock, so I'm free. Pete Davidson was born in Staten Island, New York, on November 16, 1993
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And his first brush with showbiz came at the age of 16, when a group of friends who knew
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he dreamed of being a comedian pushed him into performing at an open mic night at a
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local bowling alley. He made his first television appearance on the MTV comedy series Philosophy in 2013 and performed his first televised stand-up routine later that same year on the Comedy Central showcase Gotham Comedy Live
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Thanks to that early start, Davidson was an experienced stand-up by the age of 20 and that in turn led to acting jobs on popular shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine as well as a bit part in the Judd Apatow directed comedy Trainwreck in 2014
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and it was on the set of The Ladder that Davidson caught the eye of SNL star Bill Hader
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who recommended him to Lorne Michaels as a potential Saturday Night Live cast member
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Davidson auditioned with his stand-up routine and was such a hit with the producers
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Michaels immediately called Hader to let him know Davidson made the cut
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20-year-olds have sex like Green Day. It's basically the same s**t every time for like a minute and 52 seconds
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So on September 27th, 2014, at just 20 years old, Pete Davidson made his debut on the stage of Studio 8H
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in the process, becoming the first SNL cast member to be born in the 1990s
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Davidson's first episode was the premiere of the show's 40th season, and it was something of a transitional time for the iconic series The producers were making a concentrated effort to appeal to younger audiences and Davidson hiring was a part of that effort During his first appearance on Weekend Update he even humorously introduced by Michael Shea
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as our resident young person. But despite his youth and the fairly limited screen time
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he received in his first season, Davidson still managed to leave an impression
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on the show's fan base. That first appearance on Weekend Update, for example
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would find Davidson appearing as a commentator on a story about a teenager
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who took pictures of himself performing sexual acts on a statue of Jesus. The ensuing commentary was so memorable
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Entertainment Weekly named Davidson as the new cast member who made the biggest first impression
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The reviewer, in all fairness, was not entirely comfortable with the bit, but still noted that
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if nothing else, it demonstrated that the comedian can capture an audience's attention with ease
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If you don't go down on a guy for a million dollars, you obviously don't care about your
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family. A few months later, he appeared in the popular sketch Escape from Jungle Island
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An Indiana Jones parody that found Davidson and The Rock playing adventurers
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who have to suck poison from each other's wounds while Kate McKinnon's Explorer character enviously looks on
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That sketch became what is now arguably Davidson's most popular from his first season
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And his future on SNL looked pretty promising. At least, it did from the outside
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You got a kid? What? No, I'm a virgin. Why do you have a diaper bag
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But behind the scenes, Davidson himself felt very differently about how that freshman season was going
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In fact, according to the man himself, after my first year, I actually called for a meeting with Lorne
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I was like, please fire me. In the Peacock documentary, SNL 50 Beyond Saturday Night Live, Davidson would even recall telling the legendary showrunner
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I don't belong here. Everybody here is so talented and they don't want to be my friend
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If that strikes you as a little childish, well, Davidson would eventually come to feel the same, saying of the complaint, I was a child
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I was like, nobody wants to be my friend. But the truth is, his feelings weren't all that unusual for a new SNL cast member
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Far from it. If you saw our video about the brutal truth about joining Saturday Night Live
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then you already know the audition process is, well, brutal. But as we also alluded to in that video the audition is really just the beginning Once you on the show you face a whole new competition over who gets their material on the air and it just as tough as the audition if not tougher As Amy Poehler explains in that same documentary
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every week feels like you have to prove yourself again. Sketches get cut, they die on the table
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jokes don't make it. Yes, SNL does have a dedicated writing staff, but according to Sherry Oteri
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that staff isn't necessarily going to write material for any particular cast member. So
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performers have to be able to do it themselves if they want to get on the air, and no one's going to
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tell them how to do it either. Heck, even David Spade, who was literally hired as a writer rather
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than a performer, didn't actually know how to write a comedy sketch when he started there
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Of course, figuring out what's truly funny can itself be fairly nerve-wracking. Davidson himself
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for example, recalls the famous Farewell Mr. Bunting sketch, which killed on the air during
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his second season, made for a dry, unfunny table read. Add in the unrelenting pace of production
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and the pressure to keep the new material flowing, and it's enough to rattle the confidence of pretty much anyone
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Doink, doink. Doink, doink, doink, doink. Oh my God, the doink, doink is amazing
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For example, future I Think You Can Leave star Tim Robinson was so overwhelmed by the process
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he found himself being demoted from the cast to the writer's room after just one season
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That was a fairly drastic case, but the pressure has affected even some of SNL's most iconic performers
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Take Jason Sudeikis, who after writing and appearing in two wildly popular sketches during his first two weeks
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didn't get another one on the air for months. In fact, things got so bad for him, he found himself
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calling home to tell his family that he was starting to think about leaving SNL and going
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back to Second City. Similarly, SNL superstar Bill Hader recalled, The first four years at SNL, I was like, I'm going to get fired at any moment. His anxiety over how he
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was doing got so bad, Michaels had to take him aside during a rehearsal and literally assure him
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that his job was safe and that it was okay to relax. The same goes for future 30 Rockstar Tracy Morgan
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who also needed reassurance from Michaels after he began to doubt whether he was genuinely funny
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Bowen Yang had similar concerns, as did Bobby Moynihan who like Davidson came to believe that everyone on the show hated him and that he might be fired any day Jay Farrow was so shaken by the cutthroat nature of the production process he would later say
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at first I had blind confidence, but then the sketches started getting pulled and it just started changing
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And according to Beck Bennett, I feel like those first two years I was just so stressed out
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could not relax enough to think properly. It was always just reactive and just trying to survive a little bit
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There are plenty more examples where that came from. But as Bennett suggested, hanging in and just trying to survive the first few years does seem to be the key
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And that's not just our conclusion or even Bennett's. It comes from Lorne Michaels himself
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In fact, when Davidson asked him to be fired, Michaels' response was to tell him
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you don't figure it out until your third or fourth year. It's just going to suck for like three or four years
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And according to Davidson, Michaels was right. Davidson stuck with it, and exactly as showrunner predicted, he got his act together after a few years
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He would then go on to become one of the most iconic cast members of his era. finally departing for real in 2022
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Those last few years would also find him starring in movies like Judd Apatow's The King of Staten Island
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and since his departure from SNL, he's created and starred in the 2023 Peacock series Bubkis
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made appearances in movies like 2023's Dumb Money and 2024's Riff Raff
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and released the 2024 stand-up special Pete Davidson, Turbo Fonzarelli. And we're not even going to get into all the Kardashian stuff
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but none of it would have happened if he hadn't hung in at Saturday Night Live
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The bottom line is that the first few years as an SNL cast member are, without a doubt, rough
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But in the words of Beck Bennett, who also didn't really start getting comfortable as a performer until his third or fourth year
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after all that experience, your perspective changes a lot. Jason Sudeikis agrees, saying it's the show teaching you it's a marathon, not a sprint
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As for Pete Davidson, far from feeling like he didn't belong and no one on the show liked him
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he now sees Studio 8H as the place he grew up. In his own words
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I was like a kid when I came in, and I'll always be proud, I'll always be grateful, and I'll always miss it