Pete Davidson is just hot, actually

When pictures emerged of Kim Kardashian riding roller coasters with Pete Davidson in Knott’s Scary Park, California over Halloween weekend, Twitter was ablaze with indignation. How had the 27-year-old comedian found himself, once again, in public cahoots with an extraordinary-looking woman? And how had he managed to get the notoriously straight-laced and well-groomed Kardashian to smile (very) widely while making the sign of the horns on a log flume?

“We’re really living in unprecedented times,” tweeted @thisisnotkianna with one of the photos. Drawing comparisons to the similar successes of Machine Gun Kelly with Megan Fox and Travis Barker with Kourtney Kardashian, another user, @avalbin, asked, ​“how did the sick looking tattooed males scheme this quickly?”

The implication behind this indignation is that Kardashian is out of Davidson’s league. But the match (if it is a match) is certainly not random. Kardashian appeared on SNL earlier in October, sharing a surprisingly intimate kiss with Davidson during an Aladdin-inspired sketch.

And yet, there was a staggering amount of surprise surrounding this potential romance for a man with such a healthy dating history. Davidson has previously been linked to a string of extremely attractive women, including Ariana Grande (to who he was briefly engaged), model Kaia Gerber, and actresses Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley and Phoebe Dynevor. It’s time to accept the obvious truth: Pete Davidson is hot.

The comedian is tall and pale with a wide smile, and therein lies the attraction. Funny men, tall men and kind-of-sickly-looking men are all hot, believe it or not, and he has gone for the triple. To paraphrase Nicole Ritchie in The Simple Life, beautiful women demonstrably like men who are ​“skinny and pale, like they’re dying.” They also like men who are 6’3.

Davidson is undeniably funny, too, turning out some of the more entertaining SNL sketches, decimating the subjects of the Comedy Central Roast episodes he has appeared on, and providing an endearing and genuinely amusing performance in Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island, which he also co-wrote. In the film, his character refuses a hot dog from Steve Buscemi stating that he has Crohn’s Disease, which makes him ​“shit all the time”. In real life, Davidson has the same disease, which is likely a factor towards his sickly pallor and skin pigmentation, or what Barstool Sports quite cruelly called his ​“butthole eyes”. That or the fact that, by his own admission, he smokes weed all the time.

In the specific case of Kim Kardashian, yes, perhaps Pete Davidson isn’t the usual kind of man she goes for. But, crucially, she is currently divorcing Kanye West, who her alleged new beau once ripped to shreds on SNL after working with him. In 2018, West took time after his performance on the show to give a strange speech to the audience on how slavery ​“wasn’t real” and that the Democrats broke up Black families with welfare, while wearing a MAGA hat. In a later episode, Davidson soliloquised on how generally odd and unpleasant the rapper was, saying ​“do you know how wrong about politics you have to be for me to notice?” If Kim were to hold hands on a Halloween-themed rollercoaster with anyone, there is poetic justice in it being this particular guy.

Davidson seems to have a two to three month average per reported girlfriend, so sometime after Christmas, we will probably see him towering over another impossibly beautiful woman who looks like she’s having the time of her life. A good-faith reading of his dating history would be that there is something quite vintage about his fast-paced yet intense love life, a touch of old Hollywood glamour to his charm. He’s clearly willing to travel: when he was reportedly dating Bridgerton​’s Phoebe Dynevor, gossip site Deux Moi was inundated with sightings and blurry photos of the couple holding hands around her native Manchester.

But right now, Page Six is in a frenzy about Kim K visiting ​“Pete Davidson’s native NYC”. And whether she’s there to visit him or not, it’s time to stop acting surprised about Pete Davidson’s charm and how he wields it, as we’re inevitably going to witness this process happen time and time again. More than that, we need to accept that we are in the era of the Skinny, Sickly-Looking Man, where Pete and men like him (Machine Gun Kelly, Travis Barker, Timothee Chalamet) are linked to some of the most objectively beautiful women in Hollywood and beyond. Like it or not, Pete Davidson is currently reigning supreme in the celebrity dating game. Why? Because he’s hot.