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During their run on Saturday Night Live, Please Don’t Destroy made a lasting impression with the bitingly funny digital shorts the comedy trio wrote and starred in over the course of four seasons.
While promoting their holiday partnership with White Claw, Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy name some of their favorite videos — why a few are standouts for them.
Joining the long-running NBC sketch comedy show in season 47, the trio made their on-screen debut with “Hard Seltzer” — a pre-taped segment about the guys discovering a variety of new hard seltzers on the market — on Oct. 9, 2021.
Looking back on it, Marshall says “that is such a fun thing to think about ’cause we were truly just guessing [at the time]. Like, we had no experience. I had no idea if it was gonna work in front of a live studio audience.”
Kait Dugan/NBC
“We were basically modeling it after videos we’ve been making on Twitter. And I did not know if it would translate at all,” he continues. “We just shot it in our office together and edited it and showed people and they were laughing. So we were like, ‘Alright, we might as well try it.’ ”
“Then it went well,” Marshall, who has transitioned into a feature player for season 51, says. “It’s so funny to think that was on the Kim Kardashian episode, like, we couldn’t be more out of place. It was three guys in a bland white office talking about ourselves.”
“We didn’t even have hair and makeup for those first,” Higgins recalls.
As one of the few shorts that didn’t feature that week’s host or musical guest, Higgins adds, “We did it totally just like under the radar.”
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Another notable video for the trio is “Bad Bunny Is Shrek,” which debuted on Oct. 21, 2023 during season 47. It saw the rapper, who was the host and musical guest of the episode, write his own version of the popular animated movie with Herlihy as Donkey, Higgins as Michael Jackson and Marshall as Puss in Boots.
“It’s hard to beat Shrek,” Herlihy, who is now a writer for season 51, says now, noting “how much joy that gave me at the time and now every time I see it.”
And then there’s “Roast” with Dakota Johnson that debuted on Jan. 27, 2024 during season 49. The video featured the actress and the guys going back and forth as they traded insults about each other, before agreeing not to remark on their respective “nepo baby” status — playing off Johnson’s Hollywood lineage as well as Higgins’ father, longtime SNL writer and Tonight Show sidekick Steve, and Herlihy’s dad, Tim, who wrote for the NBC sketch show and collaborated with Adam Sandler on many of his movies.
Will Heath/NBC via Getty
“That Dakota roast video is maybe one of my favorite videos that we’ve ever done together,” Higgins says. “Like, it totally broke open something where it’s just like every single line in the video felt like a hard joke and it was truly, truly fun to shoot.”
“She was so amazing in it,” he adds of Johnson. “So I look back on that one as like one of my favorites for sure.”
As for Marshall, “Touch Up,” which was filmed for Simu Liu’s episode in season 47, stood out even though it ended up being cut for time, “[It was] maybe my favorite, which was a very early one,” he says, before quipping that he “feels proud of every single one — except, maybe, like two.”
He adds, “No, I really do. I think at least there’s something that makes me laugh in all of them for sure. I think it’s cool that we got to do that.”
Looking back on what Please Don’t Destroy was able to achieve on SNL, Higgins reflects on some advice his father gave him. “My dad once told me, he was like, ‘It’s really easy for your dream to be like this is the best video ever. But you slowly learn your goal is not to be ashamed,’ ” he says. “And I feel pretty good there’s not many videos that we made that I’m ashamed of, which is kind of a higher bar than I would have thought.”