There’s more to comedian Pete Davidson than incest jokes and toilet gags

The comedian is more famed for his recreational drug use and dating history than his comic prowess, writes Louis Chilton. But his new hour-long Netflix special, ‘Turbo Fonzarelli’, suggests that maybe it’s time for that to change

Davidson performing in his new Netflix special (Netflix)

From a distance, the rise of Pete Davidson makes little sense. The 30-year-old comedian, who began making his bones on Saturday Night Live at the age of just 20, has spent his adult years lathered in the gloss of stardom. If comedy is the art form of the outsider, then Davidson seems almost a poor fit for it.

There’s an underdog quality to him, sure: on stage he speaks of his personal struggles, including his diagnosis with Crohn’s disease and his firefighter father’s death during 9/11. But often, Davidson is regarded as a kind of generational playboy. He is more famed for his recreational drug use and dating history – comprising a string of glamorous celebrities, from Ariana Grande to Kim Kardashian to Emily Ratajkowski – than his comic prowess. He is the man around whom the viral neologism BDE (“big d*** energy”) was coined. This baggage has worked against him as a comedian; it is a large reason why Davidson has never really been considered a heavyweight standup. But his new hour-long special, Turbo Fonzarelli (streaming now on Netflix), suggests that that might not be the case for long.

In many ways, the special continues to indulge the sort of lowbrow irreverence that Davidson has trafficked in before. There’s a lengthy riff about having sex with his own mother; in another bit he describes receiving a box full of soiled pants from a female stalker, providing his own unsavoury sound effects to restage the soiling. GG Allin he ain’t, but there’s a degree of vulgarity to his act that perhaps suggests a keenness to shake off the shackles of SNL, all too often the American comedy sphere’s designated refuge for the tame and the stale. The fact that this crass material is presented in stately black and white seems, at times, a deliberate joke. And yet, it would be wrong to write Davidson off as a simple shock comic. Turbo Fonzarelli is a solidly funny hour of standup, and, in its craft, a cut above any of Davidson’s previous specials.

Historically, Davidson has often coasted on a kind of innate likeability. On SNL, he was never particularly gifted at impressions and originated few characters of any lasting impact (his best-known SNL persona was the farcically laidback “Chad”). And yet, he stuck around and was a firm favourite of the show’s famously domineering producer, Lorne Michaels. This was despite Davidson’s penchant for “corpsing”, or breaking into involuntary laughter midway through a take – a famed bugbear of Michaels. (There is, perhaps, something about Davidson’s laugh – insouciant, laced with mischief – that made it infectious rather than grating.) But with Turbo Fonzarelli, Davidson has set his sights higher than simply seeming like a “good hang”.

More than this, though, Turbo Fonzarelli manages to deflate Davidson’s offscreen persona in a way that works perfectly for comedy. Many comics thrive on the illusion of relatability – shared everyday experiences are the backbone of observational standup. Davidson, with his A-lister exes and tabloid scandals, is obviously no everyman. But he doesn’t pretend to be. He jokes deftly about a recent reckless driving incident (the house he drove into “cut me off”, he quips), and alludes to a friend leaking stories to the Daily Mail. The set climaxes with a long recounting of his experience with his stalker. It’s pointedly abstract stuff for the vast majority of his audience, but it feels authentic to his own singular life in the public eye.

In between the showbiz anecdotes and scatological flights of fancy, Davidson offers small moments of vulnerability. He speaks passingly about his mental health problems – something for which he has seldom been granted privacy – and, in one segment, mentions that he is the victim of childhood sexual abuse. Turbo Fonzarelli is decidedly not one of those standup hours that diverts into sentiment or sombreness, but there’s nothing glib about it either. We get the sense that we are watching a man reckoning with the fact that he’s tumbled into a very strange and unusual life. For now, at least, it seems as though Davidson sees the funny side.