On Aug. 17, the nightlife of the neighborhood lashed with the old glamor of the Lincoln Theater’s gaudy facade, soon to house Saturday Night Live (SNL)’s Gen-Z comedy trio, Please Don’t Destroy. A line of millennials, grasping onto their one hope for the future of SNL and now-grown YouTube kids — later on described in the show as “your bisexual daughter who also likes the show community” — wrapped around the corner. 

Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy, all former New York University students who joined SNL as writers in 2021, make up the second-wave Lonely Island. Because of their hilarious viral videos that have been given their own segment on several SNL episodes, the trio has obtained a large following and embarked on their own tour.

Emily Wilson, who relived her painfully embarrassing experience on The X Factor USA as part of her routine, was the first person to enter the stage. Wilson auditioned with her friend — only for Simon Cowel to decide that Wilson’s friend deserved to go through while Wilson stayed behind.

Wilson served herself to the audience on a silver platter, ready to sacrifice herself for the audience’s enjoyment. While it appeared to be a more cathartic moment for her than it was for the audience, her vulnerability broke through and won the audience over. 

When Marshall, Higgins and Herlihy came out in their chrome Adidas sweatsuits — wearing blue, green and red, respectively — the audience sat up in their seats and clapped their hands high in the air, a move expressing, “I don’t want to get up, but I want to show my respect for you.”

While they seemed excited to be on tour in front of a live audience, an undercurrent of exhaustion plagued their sets, particularly haunting Herlihy. The trio expressed their lethargy with prolonged sitting on stage. However, one audience member seemed more ecstatic than the rest. 

A seemingly drunk woman stood up, clapping and whooping, as the trio walked onto stage. The other audience members avoided her, leading the comedians to ask if she had bought out the entire row. After a few minutes of riffing, which ended in the woman professing that she was “only here for you guys,” the trio was shocked to have a groupie.

The three then jumped straight into their skits, the first of which was about a British DJ on New Year’s Eve. It was one of those performances where you can’t remember why the sketch was funny, but you remember that the random, out-of-pocket script had you cracking up.

The members of the trio looked sneakily at each other as they asked for someone in the audience to come up on stage to join a sketch. Instead, Conan O’Brien walked out from backstage.

The crowd went wild, giving the comedy king a standing ovation. O’Brien, an ex-late night host whose rise to prominence I’m convinced no one remembers, guilted the tracksuited trio for not giving the audience an actual chance to get on stage. He exaggeratedly told the audience that he flew all the way out to Washington, D.C., just for this one show, to do this one script that he had never read before (indicating he had in fact flown in for both the early and late show and therefore had read the script before). 

Again, O’Brien wanted to guilt the comedians on stage publicly, so he expressed his frustration at not being invited to join them on stage in Los Angeles, which would be a much more convenient commute for the former Tonight Show host. After repeating the bit that he had never read the script, O’Brien proceeded to read a script full of inappropriate jokes, pretending to be disgusted that the SNL writers had the gall to ask him to read such lines aloud. 

A few sketches without O’Brien followed, with some awkward segways. The group then proceeded to do a sketch where Herlihy and O’Brien, who returned to the stage, ended up yelling at each other from opposite balconies.

Towards the end of their set, the group asked the audience if they wanted to see a sketch that they said would not have gone over well in Nashville, Tenn. — my home city. The audience cheered, expecting a highly liberal sketch. Instead, they were met with a sketch set in an office, with two co-workers discussing something odd about their boss that they couldn’t place. Then, their boss appears, speaking in a deep southern accent. The officemates accidentally adopt a similar twang to their speech. 

The unexpected turn made the audience roar with laughter at the extremely relatable experience, one that hit me hard as I remember all the times my dad leaned into his southern accent whenever we found ourselves in rural Tennessee. Although the traveling tracksuited trio was still figuring out their stage presence, a mix of random and relatable situations got their audience to titter with laughter consistently for a whole hour. That is no small feat.