Pete Davidson's Paper Magazine Cover

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Part of a series on Pete Davidson. [View Related Entries]

About

Pete Davidson's Paper Magazine Cover refers to a photograph of American Saturday Night Live star and comedian Pete Davidson posing as a Ken Doll for Paper Magazine's Winter 2019 cover. The photograph of Pete Davidson posing in a bathroom with only a shirt on and a groan area edited to look like a Ken Doll's was posted to Paper Magazine's social media accounts and quickly went viral.

Origin

On November 21st, 2019, Paper Magazine posted the cover featuring Pete Davidson to Instagram^[1] which gained over 94,100 likes in a day (shown below, left). They also posted the image to their Twitter^[4] account and accumulated over 1,400 likes and 260 retweets in a day. They also released several more images from the photoshoot to their Instagram^[2] account (shown below, right). The additional photos garnered over 54,000 likes in a day. Along with the photographs styled by Chris Horan and Photographed by Tommy Dorfman, came an interview,"Break the Internet: Pete Davidson,"^[3] between Tommy Dorfman and Pete Davidson.

Spread

On November 21st, 2019, Paper uploaded "Pete Davidson Break the Internet Storytime with Tommy Dorfman" to YouTube (shown below). The video, showing behind the scenes of the photoshoot, gained over 3,000 views in a day.

Various media outlets like The Cut^[6] and AVClub^[5] commented on both the jarring photographs and the "depressing" interview. That day, Twitter user @HattiRex^[7] posted a Therapist, It Can't Hurt You meme including the cover (shown below, left) and Twitter user @EoinKeane101^[8] also commented on being disturbed by the photograph (shown below, right).