Davidson calls out NYC mayor on 'Jimmy Kimmel' over endless BQE construction

Pete Davidson walked onto the stage of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on a Monday night in late September and did what many New Yorkers have wanted to do for decades: he asked the city's mayor, point-blank, to fix the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The 32-year-old comedian didn't soften the request. When Kimmel mentioned that Mayor Zohran Mamdani would be appearing later in the show and asked if Davidson had anything to say to him, Davidson's answer was immediate and profane. "Could he fix the f-----g BQE, please?" The studio erupted. The applause was sustained, genuine, the kind of response that tells you something has struck a nerve.

The BQE is a major artery running through Brooklyn and Queens, and it has been a source of frustration for decades. Traffic congestion is chronic. The infrastructure is aging. And the construction—the endless, visible-nowhere construction—has become a kind of civic joke. Davidson leaned into that joke with precision. He explained that the highway has been under construction for his entire life, and yet whenever he drives past, he sees the same thing: workers standing around eating sandwiches or on their phones, cones everywhere, no actual work happening. "I don't know what mob front or whatever, who's getting money from whatever," he said, "but just fix it, please." The audience laughed and applauded again. Kimmel promised to ask the mayor about it.

When Mamdani arrived for his segment, Kimmel delivered Davidson's complaint directly. The mayor, 34 years old and a Democratic socialist who had won the mayoral race the previous November through social media and grassroots organizing, took the question with a smile. He didn't dismiss it. Instead, he outlined what his office has been working on: the BQE Central Project, a $4 billion plan to rehabilitate the sections of the expressway that the city actually owns—the stretch between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street. Construction is expected to begin in 2030. The work will take roughly a decade. Mamdani emphasized that the plan includes full safety measures and will prevent traffic from being diverted into local neighborhoods. "We're gonna be putting a multi-billion dollar plan to actually repair the part the city owns," he said. "Which is the part that is currently the most at risk."

Kimmel seized on the timeline with a joke: if construction doesn't start until 2030 and takes ten years, Pete's daughter would probably be complaining about the same thing in 2040. The audience laughed. Mamdani laughed. But the underlying tension remained unresolved—the gap between the public's frustration with a problem that has persisted for generations and the city's timeline for actually addressing it.

The exchange revealed something about how infrastructure complaints move through the culture now. Davidson, who has mostly kept his political commentary light, has been willing to take public positions when he cares about them. He supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, posted angrily when she lost, and got a tattoo of her in a power suit on his right leg. He's been removing nearly all of his other tattoos—he told Variety in an interview published that same week that they were "horrible" and a business decision, since he spent three hours in the makeup trailer covering them up before every "Saturday Night Live" appearance. Some of the tattoos, he admitted, had covered scars from self-harm during periods of intense pain. But the Clinton tattoo stays. "That's my dog," he said. "I love Hillary, man. She's awesome and a good friend." The BQE complaint, delivered with similar directness, suggested that Davidson's willingness to speak plainly extended beyond electoral politics to the basic functioning of the city he's lived in his whole life. Whether a $4 billion plan that won't break ground for four years will satisfy that frustration remains to be seen.