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.