Photo : Mike Coppola ( Getty Images )

Jamming signals or requiring everyone to lock their phones in little bags to prevent them from leaking details about your comedy show is totally played out. Luckily, occasional Saturday Night Live cast member Pete Davidson has landed on a much more thorough solution: requiring prospective audience members to sign $1 million non-disclosure agreements to bar them from talking about anything that happens onstage “on any platform, including social media.”


That comes from Consequence Of Sound, which says Davidson has apparently been doing this since early November, and audience members at a show last week were only notified about the NDA “a few hours before the performance.” One woman actually posted the agreement on Facebook, revealing that it says audience members cannot “give any interviews, offer any opinions or critiques, or otherwise participate by any means or in any form whatsoever [on any existing or future social network] in the disclosure of any Confidential information.” It also promises a full refund to anyone who refuses to sign the agreement, but if you breach the NDA, you will be asked to pay “upon demand, as liquidated damages, the sum of one million dollars, plus any out of pocket expense.”

Whether it’s related or not (we’re going to assume that it is), this comes just a few months after Davidson called a bunch of college kids “privileged little assholes” during a set at the University Of Central Florida, with videos and social media impressions quickly getting posted all over the place. At that show, he yelled at audience members for using phones and said “the world is gonna end in 25 years” because “you’re all fucking retarded.” He also apparently complained about the audience not laughing at his jokes, told them to “grow up,” promised to call all of us famous comedian friends and tell them to boycott the school, and then stayed for a short Q&A because—as he explained—he was “waiting for an Uber.”




It was a whole lot of bad press, in other words, and now it’ll never happen again because nobody who would tweet about going to a Pete Davidson stand-up show has $1 million. Now nothing can stop anyone from assuming that every other performance goes just as poorly, because there’s nothing to tell us otherwise. Or maybe he’s a comedy genius and we’ll never know because nobody can talk about it! Oh well.

