Pete Davidson and Dave Chappelle are now colleagues, but there was a time that Chappelle’s words meant so much to up-and-coming comedian that he had them permanently inked on his chest.
“I’ve never admitted this, ’cause it’s so humiliating,” Davidson said during Monday’s new episode of Hot Ones when he was asked about the tattoo removal process he’s undergoing.
Davidson recalled that, when he was about “19 or 20,” he was at a comedy club, which might have been the Knitting Factory in New York when Hannibal Buress was hosting, and saw Chappelle watching.
“This was before he was back,” Davidson said. “So seeing him was like crazy.”
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Pete Davidson’s tattoos in 2019
Davidson is 31 now, so this would have been during Chappelle’s hiatus after abruptly walking away from Chappelle’s Show, which ended in 2006. Chappelle was easing himself back into stand-up by then.
“I got off stage, and he was like, ‘I watched your whole set. It was really good,” said Davidson, who joined the cast of Saturday Night Live when he was 20. The younger comedian was emboldened to ask for some advice on writing new material because he was finding it difficult.
“And he goes, ‘Jokes come and go, but swag is forever,'” Davidson recounted. “And guess who got that tattooed on their chest? But he was like my idol. He still is.”
Davidson thought the move had been “so dumb” though.
“I could’ve just told people he said that to me,” he said. ” Also, when you see that, you think I thought of it.”
Eventually, he covered it with a tattoo of the shark in Jaws.
“I needed something huge and to black it out,” Davidson said. “So I just put a giant shark over it. That’s pretty bad, dude.”
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The King of Staten Island star has previously explained that he’s having nearly all of his tattoos — which once numbered close to 200 — removed through a painful process. He’s “trying to clean slate it” and “be an adult.”
It sounds super uncomfortable.
“They gotta burn off a layer of your skin, and then it has to heal for like six to eight weeks, and you can’t get in the sunlight, and then you gotta do it like 12 more times,” Davidson said.
He warned people to “really think about that Game of Thrones tattoo you’re thinking of getting.”
Watch the full conversation above.
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