Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, left, listens as Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Russell Vought testifies before the House Budget Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, during a hearing on the fiscal year 2020 budget. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

I wrote yesterday about how Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson pretty much did a complete reversal earlier this week on his 2018 on-air apology to then-Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). That apology came after a segment he did on SNL just days before the November 2018 election in which he told tasteless “jokes” about Crenshaw’s eyepatch. The sketch was widely panned at the time – including by other SNL cast members.

To quickly recap, Davidson said during a Netflix comedy special that aired Tuesday that he “kind of got forced to apologize” over “words that were twisted so that a guy could be famous.” He also claimed during the stand-up routine that he was pressured to apologize by his “roommate” (his mother) so he “didn’t get shot in the face”, insinuating he received death threats after original segment aired.

But after making it clear in so many words that he was taking back the apology, Davidson dove for the gutter:

The “only thing” that Davidson says he is now willing to apologize for is making Crenshaw “famous and a household name for no reason.”

“I did what, like, Ariana Grande did for me,” he jokes, before adding the punchline: “I sucked his d**k at SNL.”

The Congressman appeared on Fox and Friends this morning where he was asked about it by co-host Brian Kilmeade. Here’s how Crenshaw responded (transcribed):

Yes, I think he [became more famous from it], too, to be fair. Listen, I can’t get out of Pete Davidson’s head. He’s been thinking about me a lot for the past year as he builds this comedy routine apparently. You know, I’m not so sure his jokes always land, but it is what it is. It’s like our comedic careers are joined at the hip because he can’t stop thinking about me.

It’s a little sad. We had a really good moment, you know, at that time in 2018. America liked it. The left and the right liked it. So, we don’t really want to ruin that. I’ll tell you what though, the Pete Davidson I remember, he went out to buy some cigarettes while we were rehearsing and he came back because he had found this lighter that said “Never Forget” on it and he gave that to me as a gesture. He said this was kind of cool that this happened to come up while he was buying cigarettes. And I think he meant well at the time and you can never tell with comedians and who knows how much he had to drink beforehand. I don’t know. We don’t have to take it too seriously.

When Kilmeade asked Crenshaw which version of Davidson he believed – the one from November 2018 versus the 2020 version – Crenshaw stated it was “hard to say” but that he would prefer to remember the 2018 version:

“To be fair, if we took everything that comedians said on a Netflix special seriously, man our country would be in a world of hurt,” he concluded. “I would like to remember the guy that I saw in person and hung out with that night.”

Watch the segment below or click here to view:

As I said Thursday, I’m sure a lot of people reading about what Davidson said about Crenshaw during the special will probably think “see, that’s what a Republican gets for trying to break bread with a Hollywood liberal, yada yada”, but Crenshaw comes across as someone who operates on the “good faith” principle regardless of a person’s political leanings, regardless of how breaking bread with that person might backfire on down the line.

It did backfire, but on Davidson rather than Crenshaw – because now, as was the case at the time when the original incident happened, Crenshaw has shown himself to be the classier act.