Why Pete Davidson Asked to Be Fired After First ‘SNL’ Season

Pete Davidson says he felt like a failure at Saturday Night Live at the end of his first season as one of the youngest cast members in the show’s 50 year history.

Davidson, who was just 20 when he joined the show in 2014, revealed that he requested a meeting with executive producer Lorne Michaels to directly ask to be let go.

“After my first year, I actually called for a meeting with Lorne. I was like, ‘Please fire me,’” Davidson says in the new Peacock docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. “‘I don’t belong here. Everybody here is so talented, and they don’t want to be my friend.’ I was a child! I was like, ‘Nobody wants to be my friend!’”

Davidson sums up Michaels’ less-than-inspiring pep talk like this: “You don’t figure it out until your third or fourth year. It’s just going to suck for like three or four years.”

“He was right!” the comedian, who ended up staying with the show for eight seasons, admitted.

Since leaving the show in 2022, Davidson has acknowledged that he has become better known for his celebrity relationships with the likes of Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian than as a comedian, telling W Magazine, “I don’t want to be this loser who just dates people. That’s not who I am.”