When Pete Davidson auditioned for Saturday Night Live, he said he “didn’t know it was still on.”
The comedian stopped by The Breakfast Club and shared his experience working on the storied variety show. He was 20 years old when he tried out for the cast, although at that time he was not an avid viewer.
“I was so lucky,” he said. “I was so young. I was super naive. So I just was like, I’m just going to smoke weed and talk about, you know, what’s going on in my life.”
During the audition, Davidson was asked which sketches he liked the most on the show. He said he went to the bathroom to look up clips on YouTube to find an answer.
“I was like, ‘I like the Californians or whatever,'” he said. “But I had no idea what I was talking about.”
His unfamiliarity made him a fish out of water in Studio 8H. He admitted that it was hard to get along with his castmates, most of whom were over a decade older than him. Many of them had worked through different comedy institutions, such as The Second City or ImprovOlympic, before landing a job at the show.
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“Not saying I didn’t work hard, but I was only doing comedy, like, three, four years,” he said. “And a lot of what people liked about me was like, ‘Oh, this is, like, a kid from Staten Island that’s just talking s—.’ So you got to remember all of these people are 10, 15 years older than me working so hard.”
Davidson had a newfound appreciation for the show after attending SNL50. While he previously joked that the crowd was “terrible,” he told The Breakfast Club that the event made him understand how much of an “institution” the show is.
“This is like, you know, the Harvard of comedy,” he said.
Check out the full interview with Pete Davidson on The Breakfast Club below.
