If you can’t recall ever seeing Pete Davidson’s tattoo inspired by Dave Chappelle, no one would blame you. First, before Davidson began the torturously painful process of undoing the coloring book he’d made of his body, he sported about 200 tattoos, including one of Hillary Clinton. That makes finding the Chappelle ink a little bit like playing “Where’s Waldo?”
Second, the tattoo wasn’t a picture of Chappelle. Instead, it was a bit of advice that Chappelle gave Davidson when he was just starting out as a stand-up. “I’ve never admitted this because it’s so humiliating,” Davidson told Sean Evans on this week’s edition of Hot Ones. “But when I was like 20 at a comedy club, it might have been the Knitting Factory when Hannibal Buress used to run it, I did a set. I was like 19 or 20.”
While performing, Davidson noticed Chappelle watching from the back corner. Chappelle had walked away from his award-winning Chappelle’s Show in 2006 and was still in the midst of his comedy hiatus. “This is before he was back,” Davidson remembered. “So seeing him was like crazy.”
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After Davidson finished his set, Chappelle approached him. “He was like, ‘I watched your whole set. It was really good,’” Davidson remembered.
Davidson thanked the more experienced comic and asked for some advice: “How do you keep coming up with new stuff? I’m working on new stuff. It’s difficult.”
Chappelle’s counsel was short and to the point. “Jokes come and go,” he said, “but swag is forever.”
Davidson was wowed by the advice, so much so that, “Guess who got that tattooed on his chest?”
Like many of his tattoos, however, Davidson regretted the decision. “You know, I could have just told people he said that to me,” he explained to Evans. But when people saw the ink, they thought Davidson came up with the mantra himself. “I didn’t put ‘dash Chappelle.’”
Another option would have been small, subtle text. Instead, Davidson got the quote inked across half of his chest. He ended up being so embarrassed about the permanent advice that he “covered it with Jaws because I needed something huge to black it out,” he said. “I just put a giant shark over it.”
Davidson is currently in the painful process of removing all the tattoos of his youth. “They gotta burn off a layer of your skin, and then it has to heal for like six to eight weeks,” Davidson revealed. “And you can’t get in the sunlight, and then you gotta do it like 12 more times.”
Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there: “Really think about that Game of Thrones tattoo you’re thinking of getting.”
While Davidson rues the Chappelle tattoo today, he at least understands why he made the choice. “He was like my idol,” he argued. “He still is.”
Content shared from www.cracked.com.