Do we like Pete Davidson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. He has stood up against a high-profile anti-trans campaigner and run a good-deed campaign, but his roast jokes and old gay gags have drawn real criticism.
Pete Davidson is a Staten Island kid whose dad, a firefighter, died on 9/11, and he has spent a career turning that grief into comedy. It took him to Saturday Night Live, and he is still welcome back there: in January 2026 he popped in for a cold open. The dark humour is the brand, and it is also where the trouble starts.
His one brush with the law was a March 2023 crash. He was driving at high speed when he put his Mercedes into a Beverly Hills house, and a hydrant burst, but nobody was hurt and drugs and alcohol weren't factors. He was charged with reckless driving, did a diversion program with 50 hours of community service and a MADD session, and a judge dismissed the case in July 2024. Years earlier he joked about a politician's eyepatch, copped death threats and apologised. He later said in a Netflix special that he didn't think he'd done anything wrong.
On the harm test, the record is clean on the big stuff. On SNL in 2020 he said he was disappointed by J.K. Rowling's comments on gender and joked she'd gone all Mel Gibson on everyone. I found no campaigning against trans people, no anti-vax or climate-denial material and no conspiracy-theory slide. The blemish is older: PinkNews reported Twitter backlash to the gay-friend jokes in his 2020 Netflix special, and he joked at the roast that Ye was a Nazi, which some will find clumsy with the word gay stuck on.
The recent stoush is the roast. At Netflix's Kevin Hart roast in May he aimed a sexually explicit line at fellow comic Tony Hinchcliffe, with Charlie Kirk as the punchline, a man shot dead in September 2025. Blake Neff, producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, said he didn't like it, and critics pointed out that Davidson lost his own dad to political violence of a sort. No response from Davidson was reported. Whether that's roast-room cruelty or a joke too far depends on where you sit, but it wasn't kind.
Politically he's been willing to take a swing. In the January 31 SNL cold open he played Trump's border czar Tom Homan training clueless ICE agents in Minneapolis, with a gag about not getting filmed. That's satire aimed squarely at power, and it sits on the right side of the page for this crowd.
The good stuff is real. In September he teamed up with the UNIITE For Good campaign for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, asking people to do a good deed and log it on a national map. He has been open about how tough the day is for him, and used it to make something lighter for other people.