Culture
Pete Davidson Named His Daughter After His Dead Dad And Now Has To Explain That
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY: Pete Davidson, comedian and man who has somehow turned a lifetime of spectacular personal suffering into a career that works, is reportedly grappling with the logistics of explaining to his young daughter why she is named after a man who died in one of the most televised disasters in human history before her father was old enough to drive.
The daughter's name is Scott, which is also the name of FDNY firefighter Scott Davidson, who died on September 11, 2001, when Pete was seven years old. The naming was an act of love. The eventual conversation is going to be an act of something considerably more complicated.
"She's going to come home from kindergarten one day," a family friend allegedly said, "and the teacher will have done a unit on it."
Davidson and longtime friend Jon Stewart will co-host "NYC Still Rising After 25 Years: A 9/11 Comedy Benefit" at Madison Square Garden on September 10, with proceeds going to first responders and their families. It is, on its face, a genuinely good thing being done by two people who have spent years doing genuinely good things for this particular cause. Stewart has been yelling at Congress about first responder healthcare since before yelling at Congress was a content category. Davidson has been processing his father's death publicly since approximately the first time someone handed him a microphone.
The show is billed as a comedy benefit, which is either a brilliant idea or a sentence that would have been incomprehensible to anyone in September 2001, depending on how much time you think needs to pass before something is available for comedic processing. The answer, according to Davidson's entire career, is roughly eighteen months, maximum.
Madison Square Garden, for its part, issued a statement calling the event "a powerful evening of remembrance and laughter," which is the kind of sentence a building's PR department produces when it has been asked to describe something it does not fully have the tools to describe.
First responder advocacy groups praised the benefit, noting that many of the men and women who survived the towers are now dying of cancers that took twenty years to develop, which is the kind of detail that makes a comedy benefit feel both more necessary and more surreal simultaneously.
Davidson has spoken publicly about his father many times, in interviews, in stand-up specials, and in a 2020 film about his own adolescence that received the rare distinction of being described by critics as both "funny" and "genuinely upsetting." He has, by most accounts, made peace with the grief in the way that certain people make peace with things, which is to say he has turned it into material and then performed that material for strangers in the dark.
The daughter remains unaware of most of this. She is small. She knows her name. She does not yet know that her name is also a story, and that the story has a very specific date attached to it, and that once a year that date becomes the only thing anyone on television wants to talk about.
She will figure it out. Kids always do.
Tickets for the September 10 benefit are available now. Scott Davidson, the elder, would have been 59 this year. Scott Davidson, the younger, is reportedly doing fine.
The story we are making fun of: https://nypost.com/2026/09/08/entertainment/pete-davidson-is-thinking-about-how-to-explain-9-11-to-his-daughter/