Like The Lonely Island and Pete Davidson before them, Please Don’t Destroy, the trio of NYU-bred comedians known for their Saturday Night Live digital shorts, are spinning off from the variety show into their own feature film. It’s a trend of diminishing returns. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, their feature comedy debut, was originally slated to premiere in theaters before it got dumped on Peacock, and for good reason. I imagine most people involved don’t want viewers to notice. As comedy writers and movie actors, the members of Please Don’t Destroy – Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall – are out of their depth.
That’s not a knock on their brand of comedy, which works in small doses. I’ve been a fan of some of their sketches, particularly their pre-SNL videos posted on Twitter during the long, bizarre malaise that was being online during Covid. At their best, the trio’s comedy is delightfully inane and snappy, burrowing so deep into an absurd distillation – Spongebob as a forgotten college classmate, Ben stealing Post Malone’s face tattoos, a Netflix doc made about Martin’s life – as to hit magical realism and get stuck in your head. Their style is silly, self-deprecating and powered by the friends’ familiar rapport. These are the guys who recently dressed as Donkey, Puss in Boots and Michael Jackson for a skit called Bad Bunny Is Shrek, and then revealed they wrote it at 1am.
