Pete Davidson says making fun of ex Ariana Grande is ‘fair game’

Pete Davidson didn’t hold back from making fun of ex Ariana Grande during his new Netflix special Alive From New York.

While the SNL player, 26, said he didn’t initially plan on mocking his former love in the stand-up special, Davidson declared the pop star ‘fair game’ after a friend told him she only dated the comic ‘as a distraction.’

Pete wasn’t pulling punches during the special, lashing out at the thank you, next singer at the same time as rescinding an apology to Texas politician Dan Crenshaw.

Davidson compared his rise to fame with Crenshaw’s newfound notoriety, claiming he ‘made [Crenshaw] famous’ the same way Grande elevated Pete’s public stature.

Pete outraged many after joking about Crenshaw’s eyepatch on SNL, telling audiences he was ‘he was surprised [Crenshaw is] a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno movie.’

‘It was a very harmless Saturday Night Live joke. I didn’t think anything of it,’ Davidson explained.

But after receiving death threats and a loud public backlash, Pete issued an apology.

Still, he was upset at people crediting him with elevating the Texas Republican’s status.

‘The only thing I don’t like is people are, like, “It’s your fault that guy won”,’ he complained. ‘…That’s not true. I think like most of the votes were in and that guy is a Republican with an eye patch in Texas. So it was a lock before it even started.’

‘The only thing I did do, which I am guilty of and I apologized for, is I did make that guy famous, and a household name for no reason,’ he went on, before quipping ‘I did what Ariana Grande did for me.’ 

‘I wasn’t going to do jokes about this, but then my buddy told me, he’s like, “Yo, I recently heard that Ariana said she had no idea who you were and she just dated you as a distraction.” So now I just think it’s like fair game,’ he continued.

‘She won Billboard’s Woman of the Year, and I got called ‘butthole eyes’ by barstoolsports.com,’ Pete went on laughing.

Davidson’s cutting jokes came after he opened up about the end of his relationship with Grande during a YouTube interview with Charlamagne Tha God. 

During their lengthy sit-down, the comedian revealed his romance with Grande was over when her ex Mac Miller died.

‘I pretty much knew it was around over after that,’ the SNL castmember said. ‘That was really horrible, and I can’t imagine what that s*** is like. All I do know is that she really loved the s*** out of him and she wasn’t putting on a show or anything.’

Davidson, 26, explained that he ‘totally got it’ when it came to his then fiancee’s feelings about Miller with whom she’d had a two-year relationship. 

‘I was like, ‘Listen, I get it, do whatever you’ve got to do, I’ll be here.’ I think I said, ‘I’ll be here until you don’t want me to be here,” he said.

Miller passed away on September 7, 2018, from an accidental drug overdose. He was 26.

In mid-October, Davidson and Grande ended their engagement. 

He went on to date actresses Kate Beckinsale, 46, and Margaret Qualley, 25, and Cindy Crawford’s 18-year-old daughter Kaia Gerber.

He acknowledges that he does use his love life as a source of jokes for his stand-up routines but he also seeks to be ‘cool’ with his exes and draws the line at anything he would consider ‘hurtful.’

He told Charlemagne Tha God: ‘I wanna be cool with everybody but, you know, stand-up’s part of my life. That was a highly publicized thing. I feel like [Ariana] got her fair run and her fair stab at it, and like I said, I don’t have social media and I don’t have an outlet really to express my feelings so stand-up’s just how I do it.’

He added that the Thank U Next hitmaker is ‘the queen of shade… I hope people feel the same way about my jokes.’

Davidson recently completed a stint in residential rehab in Arizona where he sobered up and got help with his depression. 

He said that going forward, he is done with dating ‘for a while’. 

‘I’m going to try and stay away from that. It’s just a lot,’ he said.