Talking Touring and 'SNL' With Please Don't Destroy

Just six years ago, Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy were NYU students performing stand-up shows under the name Please Don’t Destroy My Farm at New York City’s The PIT.

When the pandemic put a stop to live performances, the trio found viral success with their videos, many of which put an absurdist spin on COVID-era realities like vaccines and Zoom layoffs. Now known as just Please Don’t Destroy, the group joined Saturday Night Live in 2021, and their prerecorded segments have since seen appearances from hosts including Ana De Armas, Austin Butler and Brendan Gleeson, among others.

Please Don’t Destroy’s 30-plus-date summer tour will bring them to TPAC’s Polk Theater on Tuesday, July 18. In advance of their Nashville appearance — and mere moments before SAG-AFTRA's July 13 strike-notice announcement — Marshall, Higgins and Herlihy hopped on the phone with the Scene to talk SNL, touring, the WGA strike and more. Thank you to Scene editorial intern Braden Simmons for his assistance with transcription of this interview.

I imagine it was a crazy amount of whiplash going from shooting your own videos to, within a couple of episodes, getting a production team behind you and cameos from Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Rami Malek. What’s it like going from like shooting in your apartment to having this enormous opportunity?

John Higgins: As you can imagine it was, it’s the craziest thing ever. Like, going from our buddy Pete on an iPhone shooting us to having people with real cameras and one of the biggest celebrities in the world singing at us was the craziest feeling of all time. Almost so crazy that you couldn’t even think about it — you just kinda had to like write it and go for it. But it’s been amazing, and we just feel incredibly lucky.

Ben Marshall: And SNL is so fast-paced, and you’re like doing things every second of the day, so you kinda like don't even realize it while you're there. And then on a hiatus, you’ll just be hanging out and you’ll watch one of the videos and it feels like you’re watching someone else. You’re like, “Oh that looks like you had a good time.” 

And you guys are shooting the Please Don’t Destroy segments in your actual office, not on a soundstage, correct? 

JH: Yeah, all those videos are all in our actual office, and we used to shoot them on Mondays with just kinda like the bare minimum amount of people, because we were kinda doing it under the radar a little bit because we didn't really know how else to do it. But yeah those were all in our office.

BM: Except for one, which towards the very end of the year, there was like some production restraint where we had to shoot something on another set and in our office on the same day, and it was going to be too much to do. And this is how talented the SNL design team is. They built an entire replica office on the soundstage. And it’s literally impossible to tell apart, and you would never guess which video it was. And that's an exclusive, nobody knows that. You can run with that.

Do you find that most of the hosts are pretty game to try out some of your more far-out ideas and do you find that they’re ready to collaborate? Or do you have to give them the tough sell sometimes?

JH: I would say for the most part, hosts at SNL are down to try a lot of things. So, like the craziest example for me is Rami Malek. It was like the third show, we had only done “Hard Seltzer,” and he was so game for whatever that it was like a pretty shocking experience. Dude had just won an Oscar, and then we were like, “Will you act kinda like a man child and you want a treat because you were on good behavior?” And he was like, “Yeah, maybe something like this?” And he improvised and had a blast with it and it was crazy.

I’m sure it was an anticlimactic ending to your second season with the writers' strike landing just before your final few episodes. How has it been this summer with the strike still going on? Is there still a sense of uncertainty?

BM: Yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty. There's been some crazy recent articles about the AMPTP saying that they’re going to wait out the strike until the writers start losing their apartments. Which is awesome. It’s nuts! I mean, we’re obviously super proud to be a part of the WGA and hope that it gets resolved as quick as it can, and that the writers get a fair deal. But yeah it was the last three episodes I think got canceled. Pete Davidson was in the office, and we were pitching to him on a Monday, and everyone had all these great ideas and we were so psyched to see him. And then that night at midnight the strike was called and we all had to leave, so it was kinda crazy.

Immediate shutdown, right?

JH: Yeah, it was right away.

For folks who have’t gotten the chance to see you live, how is that different from your video work? Is it sketch-based, some improv, some stand-up elements?

JH: It’s a big hybrid of everything that you just said. It’s like sketches, we talk to the crowd, we have microphones the whole time so it kinda feels stand-uppy even when we’re doing our sketches and stuff. So I would say that if you’re a fan of the videos it’ll be fun because its a different side of us we’ll be playing different characters in situations that go outside of either an apartment or an office.

Martin, let me ask you and John: You guys have a bit of a legacy with your dads working on SNL. Growing up did you get to see into that world a whole lot, or was it largely a mystery until a couple of years ago when you got the job?

Martin Herlihy: I mean, in the sense that my parents were always funny and I wanted to be funny. I think I might add, speaking for myself, that we grew up in Connecticut, and it felt pretty removed from show business itself. But of course I did always want to be doing this professionally. There was definitely some connection with my dad, but I didn’t grow up surrounded by it I guess I’d say.

JH: Yeah, and I think it’s pretty similar for me. It was different because it was like I would watch the show every Saturday, because I was like, “Oh, this is what my dad does.” So it was cool, and I would ask him about it. And then like as I grew up — my older sister is like a nurse and so she wasn’t as interested — but as a kid I was in love with comedy, so I would ask about sketches and who wrote what. When I was in eighth grade, I was like obsessed with Simon Rich and I knew what sketches him and [John] Mulaney wrote. And it was like an incredibly — I am so grateful for that experience, because as I was falling in love with it I could ask somebody that was involved.

Martin, is there anybody on the short list that you’re looking to collaborate with?

MH: Oh man. I think Will Ferrell — yeah that would be amazing.

The Molly Shannon bit was killer, and it seemed like she was down to jump into a really abstract idea and really run with it.

MH: Oh totally yeah, she was so great.

It seems like hosts who are former cast members know the rhythm of the show, and they slip back in to it pretty easily. Have you found that to be the case?

BM: Totally, yeah, it’s really fun when people who worked there as cast or writers come back to do it. Mulaney hosted when we were there, and that was really cool to see because he just had such a familiarity with the process and all the different departments. So they usually have a bit of a leg up.

Is tonight your first performance of the tour?

JH: We’ve been doing them in New York, just kinda building material and stuff at smaller shows. At The Bell House or Union Hall or City Winery, and then like two weeks ago we did our first bigger show in Philadelphia. So tonight is just like the start of the consistent shows. We kinda had a practice run in Philadelphia which was so sick and amazing, and we’re excited to keep it up. 

A lot of the venues on your tour, they’re halls and theaters. They’re larger venues. Do you feel like there’s a different vibe when you’re doing these larger spaces than the smaller clubs? 

BM: Yeah, we’re so used to performing in really small, intimate venues, and so to be able to stretch and expand a little bit into a bigger theater has been extremely cool. I mean honestly we’ve only really done it the one time in Philly, but that was such a good experience where we had so many people who had seen our stuff come out. I think it was a really fun show.

JH: Yeah, it’s weird going from — before the pandemic even, we used to host this weekly show at this bar in New York called Von in its basement, where there was like, 12 fold-out chairs that sometimes would not be full. So like going from that to, you know, Nashville or wherever is an insane difference.

Yeah, you guys are in Polk Theater at our performing arts center — that’s like, official. 

JH: Dude don’t scare me.

There’s footlights, there’s people there who get paid salaries.

JH: It’s not just one bartender that doesn’t want you to be there?