Boys, Interrupting

At home with the members of sketch-comedy group Please Don’t Destroy, viral auteurs of the absurd roommate run-in.

- By Rebecca Alter. Photograph by DeSean MCClinton-Holland

It’s 80 degrees out but feels hotter inside this four-bedroom apartment on the upper Upper West Side, where the AC is off to cut noise and the three members of the sketch comedy group Please Don’t Destroy are on their 19th take of the same 15-second stretch of video. The setup of this sketch is that the guys—Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall— are all watching Family Feud when an Anonymous-style hacker intercepts their TV feed and addresses them by name. They consider and film every possible variation on the opening segment like food scientists lab-testing a new variety of Twinkie: Should they lean forward when the hacker appears on TV or all fall back onto the couch? Should they play it like terror or just confusion? At what point should their friend—and today’s cameraman—Pete Christmann whip the iPhone around to catch their reactions?

The hacker character isn’t scary, just extremely lame in that male-coded sort of way where he wants to talk about dogecoin and maybe meet up at Barcade. Partway through, Herlihy realizes that the sketch—which, like many of their videos, will probably get at least 100,000 likes when they post it to Twitter and TikTok—is simply them “just being mean to a weird guy.”

“Yep,” Marshall says. “That’s what comedy is!”