Apology 101

As readers of these pages know, I am co-founder with Nell Minow of the Apology Institute of America.  We take public apologies very seriously, and grade them on a very difficult scale with high standards.  On this past weekend's Saturday Night Live, Pete Davidson made one of the best public apologies I've seen.  And on my checklist, I give it a very rare A.  It doesn't meet all the criteria for a top-notch apology (such as noting the lessens learned and why the mistake won't be repeated), which is why I knocked off the "+", but given that it was done on a comedy show, I'm able to put its lapses in proper perspective.  And furthermore what it did do right, it did so with such tour-de-force openness that that compensates for other areas.  I don't want to say more about why and how, but I've embedded the video below.

They very briefly explain the background in the segment, but in a bit more detail it had to do with a bit he did on Weekend Update, called 'First Impressions' where he showed a bunch of pictures of Republican politicians and joked about what they each looked like to him.  To be clear, he also put up a photo of himself and joked about it.  The problem was that one of the candidates was Lt. Commander Dan Crenshaw.  

It hasn't been a great couple of weeks for Davidson, who recently had his engagement to singer Ariana Grande called off.  But he handled this with great and proper verve.   In fact, I also think he took one for the team.  Though Davidson got the criticism and took full blame, there is no way that his monologue the week before did not get approved by the head writers of the show, by the producers and probably by NBC's Standards and Practices.  So, it's even more to the credit of the goofy, self-effacing Davidson that he presented the following.

And if you already saw it, I suspect most agree it's worth a second look.