Pete Davidson can understand why people are hesitant to shed their masks even after getting the COVID vaccine, especially because he was already worried about getting a different virus: AIDS.
In Davidson’s latest overshare on the season finale of “Saturday Night Live,” the comic went on to compare the long-running comedy show to the deadly virus.
“Hey, AIDS is a lot like ‘SNL,’” Davidson told Colin Jost during the show’s “Weekend Update” segment. “It’s still here, it’s just, no one’s gotten excited about it since the ’90s.”
According to Davidson, that joke was written by “SNL” showrunner Lorne Michaels himself.
Davidson first explained that he was already in a state of anxiety before the pandemic hit and that his brain “didn’t have room for something new to panic about.”
“Like I can’t start being afraid public restrooms will give me COVID, when I was already afraid they’d give me AIDS,” he said.
To assuage Davidson’s fear, Jost noted that it’s not possible to get AIDS from the surface of a toilet.
The bulk of Davidson’s segment focused on the tricky issues of masks during the pandemic. He admitted that he actually wasn’t all that upset when mask mandates went into effect last year, if only because less people would recognize him (admittedly though, that backfired, as Davidson said people could still recognize him by just his eyes).
Now that mask mandates are lifting across the country, Davidson offered advice to people who are nervous about returning to normal.
“If you’re vaccinated, it’s OK to relax,” Davidson says. “People aren’t getting the vaccine because they think it’s just Bill Gates trying to put a micropchip inside of you. But trust me, if he was that much of an evil genius, Melinda would’ve signed a pre-nup.”
You can watch Pete Davidson’s full appearance on SNL above.