The First Movie by These SNL Standouts Made Me Laugh So Hard I Missed a Bunch of the Jokes
Is it appropriate to call the three members of the sketch comedy group Please Don’t Destroy “boys”? They are grown men, in a sense, with jobs (Saturday Night Live writers) and, one assumes, growing 401(k)s. They’re in their mid-to-late 20s, six years into a career that started at New York University. Yet in other ways they are very obviously still tweens, gangly and silly, still figuring it all out. They’ve been known to sign emails to reporters “The Boys.” (This was revealed in a Vulture profile headlined “Boys, Interrupting.”) Their comedy depends on the kind of hothouse riffing in which boys stuck together in a room will always engage. (That room started as an Upper West Side living room, and is now usually their office in Rockefeller Center.) Most of all, the Please Don’t Destroy boys are boys, in the sense of yelling “Ma boyz!” upon walking into a room and seeing ya boyz.
The boys are Ben Marshall (the redheaded one), Martin Herlihy (the one with glasses), and John Higgins (the other one). You have probably seen their rapid-fire sketches on YouTube or Twitter, where they first came to prominence with a sketch about a shady COVID vaccine (not Pfizer or Moderna, but [Eastern European accent] Dumbrekka), or on SNL, where their pre-taped bits (“Three Sad Virgins,” “Dawg Food”) are so obviously highlights of the show that no one really even gets annoyed that two of them are the children of former SNL writers.
Those sketches explore absurd concepts (there’s a new type of dog, Martin and John have a secret family) through ever-heightening gags, often delivered so quickly that you might try not to laugh at one because you’re certain to miss another. Now the boys get out of the little room and into the great big world in a new movie, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, directed by SNL’s Paul Briganti, and premiering today on Peacock. I don’t know how long the boys can keep tapping the well of their surreal imaginations before they become exhausting. But I do know that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain made me laugh so hard I missed a number of jokes.
The not-a-boy, not-yet-a-man world of friendship and one-upmanship has long been fertile ground for contemporary comedy, never more than in the mid-2000s heyday of Judd Apatow, whose arrested developers, constantly hungry and horny and high, were dragged, kicking and screaming, from teenagerhood into growing up. Please Don’t Destroy are not even really teenagers—when they meet real teenagers, the teens bully the boys into buying them beer—and Foggy Mountain, also produced by Apatow, allows the boys to explore a gentler, doofier terrain. They are not the man-boys of Knocked Up. They are not the raging ids of Step Brothers. They are nice boys. Misguided, foolish, lazy, yes—but basically nice guys with an emotional age of, say, 12.
John (Higgins—the boys don’t even bother changing their first names) looks forward to nothing as much as “Flyday Friday,” when the buddies drink hard seltzers and fly together in the wingsuit chamber after closing up Trout Plus, the outdoors-themed store where they all incompetently work. Martin is too afraid of his girlfriend breaking up with him to tell her, for example, that he doesn’t want to be adult-baptized. And Ben wants to take over Trout Plus from his dad, who’s played by Conan O’Brien. His disbelieving dad reminds Ben that he doesn’t even like the outdoors. “Remember Boy Scouts? The only badge you got was in Diversity and Inclusion.” (“It’s really important,” Ben protests.)
The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is an adventure story that takes our three heroes on a quest for a bust of Marie Antoinette hidden in the woods by a 19th-century explorer, who … well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that when the boys were little boys, not grown-up boys, they discovered an old compass up on Foggy Mountain, and now they’re off to the woods to find the treasure! It’s so simple-minded it might as well be a Hardy Boys book, or an old Jack Handey-written SNL sketch. In the forest, the boys are chased by a hawk, fall off a cliff, and sing in sweet three-part harmony. They meet two park rangers (Megan Stalter and X Mayo), one set on stealing the treasure, one set on stealing John’s heart. Even when the treasure makes them rich and drives them apart, we can tell they are still little boys who just want to play. “I am de captain now,” John proclaims, and the others instantly reprimand him—obviously not for the first time—“Don’t you do that. Don’t quote Captain Phillips.” An absurdly suited Ben stops in the local diner and orders what he thinks a rich guy would order: “Sausage platter, black coffee, and a double whiskey, neat.”
Throughout, the movie is studded with the kinds of very short, very funny set pieces that are Please Don’t Destroy’s stock in trade. John’s flashback to the catastrophic middle-school talent show where he set his penis on fire but also met his best friends. Martin demanding that his priest eat the walnuts his girlfriend puts on his salad, because Martin’s never told her he’s deathly allergic. Ben’s inability to make his bird whistle produce a sound other than the strangled shriek of a frightened man. It all comes together as the boys battle a cult led by Bowen Yang, who, between this and Dicks: The Musical, is making himself the guy to hire when you need someone who’s game for whatever to fly in to your film set for a couple of days and sprinkle some star power over everyone.
“We’re in our 20s, you guys,” John tells his friends, early in the movie. “This is our time to have fun and hang out with our friends.” The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is an ode to having fun and hanging out with your friends, even to a possibly unhealthy extent. When Ben points out that they’re getting older, John scoffs. “Next thing I know, you’re gonna, like, go to bed at 10 p.m., and pay your taxes.”
“Do you not pay taxes?” Martin asks.
“You don’t have to pay taxes under a certain bracket,” John replies with serene confidence. I know Please Don’t Destroy will have to grow up eventually. But I hope they stay 12 as long as they can.
