Pete Davidson Reveals He Was High at Aretha Franklin’s Funeral in Netflix Special
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Pete Davidson dropped his third hourlong stand-up special (and second for Netflix) in the early hours of Jan. 9. Titled Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli, it’s far and away his most confident, assured, and hilarious one yet, featuring rapid-fire jokes about everything from a Make-A-Wish scenario gone awry and navigating his stalker to a confusing childhood crush on Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio.
Early on in the special, directed by Jason Orley in stark black and white, the former Saturday Night Live cast member addresses the time he attended Aretha Franklin’s funeral at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple in 2018. The comic found himself at the “Queen of Soul’s” funeral as the plus one of his then-fiancée Ariana Grande, who performed at the service, and the internet had a field day about it at the time. According to Davidson in Turbo Fonzarelli, he was high on ketamine at the event and disassociating.
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“It’s embarrassing when you’re not on ketamine anymore, though… I’m embarrassed,” he says in the special. “I was out and about like that. That’s not cool, you know? I was at funerals like that. That’s fucked up, right? I was at Aretha Franklin’s funeral like that. Yeah, I have to live with that. You know what I mean? She’ll never know, but still, that’s not the point. You know what I mean?”
He continues, “If she was there, she would probably be like, ‘Hey, who are you? And what the fuck are you doing at my funeral?’ It’s embarrassing. I’m so high, I thought it would be a good idea to go up to her family and go, ‘Hey, I’m just here to pay my R-E-S-P-E-C-T…S.”
Davidson, 30, had previously opened up about feeling bad for Bishop Charles E. Ellis III, who awkwardly embraced Grande at the funeral — his hand getting very close to her chest — and made a poor joke about how he thought the pop diva was a new Taco Bell item, confusing the Italian-American Grande with someone who is of Hispanic descent. Davidson also confessed he’d “never been prouder” than when he thought Bill Clinton, who was also in attendance, was ogling Grande.
Grande broke off her engagement and split from Davidson in October 2018, a few months after Franklin’s funeral.
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