The video that ushered Saturday Night Live into the digital era barely made it to television, and when it did, it was largely ignored. It’s a heartfelt conversation between two friends (played by Andy Samberg and Will Forte) about a recent tragic loss; after every emotional beat, each of them takes a bite out of a large head of lettuce. When the video was screened during SNL’s live taping, the studio audience was clearly puzzled, the laughs barely rising above a polite chuckle. “Lettuce,” created in December 2005 by Samberg’s Lonely Island sketch group, could have been the end of SNL’s experimentation with prerecorded digital sketches.

But then, two weeks later, came “Lazy Sunday,” a music video in which Samberg and his SNL co-star Chris Parnell rap about “lame, sensitive stuff,” as Samberg once put it: buying Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and going to a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. To this day, it feels like something furtively sneaked onto the air, a blast of youthful punchiness wedged in between SNL’s often bloated bits of vaudeville. “Lazy Sunday” became a breakaway hit and ultimately helped demonstrate that SNL could still be a place where comedy felt fresh and strange rather than rote and reactive.

As Lonely Island’s profile rose, its grainy videos turned into slick, celebrity-studded spectacles. Perhaps the pinnacle of the group’s achievements was 2006’s “Dick in a Box,” in which Samberg parodied the songwriting and music-video conventions of ’90s boy-band pop, recruiting a veteran of that moment, Justin Timberlake, to join in. Wearing gift-wrapped packages on their crotches, Samberg and Timberlake deliver a pitch-perfect send-up of the baby-making ballads of acts like Color Me Badd and Backstreet Boys. The production is gleefully boneheaded and delightfully weird—but not so weird that the show’s core demographic would miss the joke.

Samberg left SNL in 2012; the other two members of Lonely Island, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, left around the same time. For a while, it seemed like the show might never recapture the group’s knack for virality. Two cast members, Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett, starred in several surreal “digital exclusives,” but they failed to attract much of a following (and were often cut before airtime). These had the bizarro vibe that viewers had come to expect from the form, but without Lonely Island’s mainstream legibility: more “Lettuce” than “Lazy Sunday.”

Then, in 2021, SNL hired Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy, a comedy team who’d met at NYU and called themselves Please Don’t Destroy. The group had developed a big following with short videos for TikTok and Twitter during the COVID lockdowns, but its members could easily have been dismissed as legacy hires by a nearly half-century-old institution: Both Higgins’s and Herlihy’s fathers wrote jokes for SNL. Despite that pedigree, the three have brought something new to the venerable sketch show, which recently returned from a hiatus lengthened by the writers’ strike. They’ve figured out how to tap into the manic, juddering energy of comedy in the smartphone era.

Part of what makes a Please Don’t Destroy sketch so disorientingly funny is the way it can snap from the quotidian to paranoid hysteria in seconds. In March 2021, before the group joined SNL, one video opened with Marshall returning home after getting his first COVID vaccine. His friends ask the then-ubiquitous question: Pfizer or Moderna? Neither, it turns out. Marshall proudly proclaims that he’s gotten the off-brand “Dumbrekka” vaccine (“They put me under for the whole thing, and it only took a couple of hours,” he reports cheerily). Higgins and Herlihy’s confusion builds to concern as Marshall describes his post-jab symptoms: “I’ve been expelling a ton of black bile,” he says. His friends try to impress upon him that his health seems imperiled, but Marshall angrily denounces them as “anti-vaxxers”—before promptly collapsing on the floor, unconscious.

On SNL, the group’s brisk, lo-fi skits still play like fever dreams, with the intense, quick-cut cadence that defines the TikTok aesthetic. The videos tend to begin in mundane settings, often the ambience-free office that the three young writers inhabit at Rockefeller Center. Their tenuous place in the show’s hierarchy and desperation to come up with material are a consistent backdrop.

Please Don’t Destroy, in its dry, Gen Z way, relies on the classic sketch-comedy gambit of escalating some minor concept into absurdity. But it’s arguably doing something deeper, too. The videos have a certain fraternal energy that is key to the group’s appeal; they feel like compressed buddy comedies with an edge of lunatic horror. The three men are presented as best friends, yet they are always on the brink of exploding into some outlandish fight. Because they seem to know almost everything about one another, they can attack insecurities with abandon, then reconcile just as quickly.

This dynamic is perhaps most clearly on display in a sketch where Marshall feels excluded after discovering that Higgins and Herlihy are lying about having plans just so they can hang out alone. Marshall decides to spy on his friends (with help from a deranged Woody Harrelson) and learns that not only are they happily playing video games without him, but they have secretly married and started a family.

Shifting ideas of masculinity is a theme SNL has frequently mined in recent years; one 2021 sketch, “Man Park,” advertises the equivalent of a dog park where men who struggle with intimacy can connect over football and Marvel movies. Although entertaining as far as it goes, the sketch was content to hit a familiar satirical target: the inability of men to express emotions. Please Don’t Destroy is at once more surreal and more nuanced in its portrait of male friendship. In one sketch, Marshall and Herlihy gleefully rattle off insults about Higgins’s ex-girlfriend, only to learn that they’ve gotten back together, that they are in fact now engaged, and that the ex-girlfriend has been sitting in the room the entire time. (Also, her entire family has been listening on Zoom.) The skit captures the male tendency to bond through ridicule, to avoid the subject of romance at all costs, and to fear that maintaining an adult relationship is antithetical to being one of the boys.

And despite the terrible things the three do and say to one another, the fun they have pushing the boundaries of their comedy ever further is palpable.

Inevitably, the group’s success has now led to a movie deal; in November, NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, released Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, written by and starring Herlihy, Higgins, and Marshall. The three play “themselves,” except they’re all employees of a Bass Pro–type store run by Marshall’s disapproving dad (depicted with cruel relish by Conan O’Brien). Seeking an escape from the daily grind, the friends go into the woods on a treasure hunt.

The Treasure of Foggy Mountain struggles in ways that are familiar from many of the SNL-themed movies that flooded theaters in the ’90s after the success of Wayne’s World—comedies that tried to elevate one-joke sketches like “Coneheads” and “A Night at the Roxbury” into film-length odysseys. There are flashes of comic virtuosity here, but like most SNL films, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain feels padded, even at 90 minutes, perhaps more so given the sprightly sketches with which Please Don’t Destroy made its name.

Simmering straight-male insecurity remains the engine of the comedy, with the needy alliances of the three pals shifting throughout the plot. Here, though, that dynamic wears itself out. As the stars hunt for treasure, their friendship is tested, before all is eventually forgiven; think The Goonies, except the children are nominally adults. Seeing the trio do their thing at feature length, you mostly just miss that dingy SNL office and those fun-house-mirror glimpses of their oddly charming bond.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Bizarro Buddy Comedy of Please Don’t Destroy.”