Rep. Dan Crenshaw said it’s “a little sad” that his name is still linked to Pete Davidson’s, after the Saturday Night Live star revealed he was “forced to apologize” for a 2018 joke about the politician.
“It’s like our comedic careers are joined at the hip because he can’t stop thinking about me,” Crenshaw, the 35-year-old congressman from Texas’ 2nd congressional district, said on Fox & Friends on Friday, February 28. “It’s a little sad.”
He continued: “We had a really good moment, you know, at that time in 2018. America liked it. The left and right liked it. So, you know, we don’t really want to ruin that.”
The two men first butted heads in November 2018 after Davidson, 26, made light of the eye patch the former Navy SEAL wears as a result of losing his right eye in a 2012 IED blast during a tour in Afghanistan.
“This guy is kind of cool, Dan Crenshaw,” Davidson said during an SNL Weekend Update segment at the time. “You may be surprised to hear he’s a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno movie. … I’m sorry, I know he lost his eye in war or whatever.”
Later that month, Davidson apologized for the wisecrack in another Weekend Update installment. “In what I’m sure was a huge shock for people who know me, I made a poor choice last week,” he said. “I made a joke about Lieutenant Commander Dan Crenshaw, and on behalf of the show and myself, I apologize.”
He went on: “I mean this from the bottom of my heart. It was a poor choice of words. The man is a war hero and he deserves all of the respect in the world. And if any good came of this, maybe it was that for one day the left and the right finally came together to agree on something: that I’m a d—k.”
Then Davidson brought Crenshaw on the show, and the veteran got in some digs of his own. “This is Pete Davidson,” Crenshaw said on the show. “He looks like if the meth from Breaking Bad was a person. He looks like a troll doll with a tapeworm. He looks like Martin Short in The Santa Clause 3. By the way, one of these people was actually good on SNL.”
But in his new Netflix special, Pete Davidson: Alive From New York, the Set It Up actor implies he didn’t issue the mea culpa voluntarily.
“I got in trouble last year because I was making some jokes,” he said during the special. “I didn’t think I did anything wrong. It was like words that were twisted so that a guy could be famous. … So I made fun of this guy with an eye patch, and then, like, I kind of got forced to apologize.”
