Please Don’t Destroy have built an entire comedy universe out of roasting each other—and being roasted by celebrities from Taylor Swift to Dakota Johnson. Now, thanks to a high-tech assist, anyone can get roasted by the trio.
As one of their first post-SNL projects as a group, the trio has partnered with White Claw on a “Roast Generator” that lets fans enter details about a friend and receive a customized roast delivered by PDD themselves.
Speaking with LateNighter, Martin Herlihy joked that when he first heard the pitch, he briefly worried they’d end up “trapped in the computer” through the holiday season, but confirmed no such sci-fi fate occurred.
Instead, the group was tasked with shooting dozens of roasts, which will be mixed and matched depending on how users respond to a series of prompts.
The shoot took about five hours on a soundstage in Brooklyn; as such, the trio found that keeping their energy up was its own challenge. “Roasting is a high-energy sport,” John Higgins said. By the end, everyone was getting punchy, including a cue-card operator who started laughing so hard he had to leave the room. (“He was doing a high-pitch snort-laugh,” Ben Marshall added.)
PDD’s Roast Generator is part of a larger new holiday collaboration with hard seltzer brand White Claw.
Though unintentional, the partnership also serves as a nod to PDD’s very first Saturday Night Live short, 2021’s “Hard Seltzer,” which imagined a world where every major brand had entered the hard seltzer boom—from JCPenney to Jiffy Lube—and ended with Herlihy pulling a metal belt buckle out of his mouth as an unfortunate “aftertaste.”
“It’s just a weird full-circle thing,” Marshall told LateNighter. “We’ve been talking about hard seltzer for years, so it’s only right that we team up with a hard seltzer brand.”
The broader campaign includes the “Roast Host Collection,” a limited-edition line of White Claw-branded dinnerware printed with PDD-approved burns, like “You couldn’t read a room if it had subtitles” and “Unsolicited advice is your love language.”
The collection goes on sale today, Thursday, Dec. 4, at 1 p.m. ET, with a second drop arriving Wednesday, December 10. Items start at $5, or fans can purchase the full set—which includes a serving platter, plates, coasters, and napkins—for $45 plus tax.
The project marks PDD’s first major collaboration since they ended their four-year run on SNL. Higgins departed after last season, while Herlihy remains on the writing staff and is contributing shorts of his own. Marshall joined the cast this season as a featured player.
Marshall said fellow former-writers-turned-cast-members like Bowen Yang and Mikey Day have been helpful in his transition: “Everyone is so nice and wants you to succeed.”
As for someday returning to the show as a trio, Herlihy and Higgins joked they’d only do it “as a jazz trio” for SNL’s 80th anniversary.
PDD’s Roast Generator and White Claw’s full lineup of roast-ready holiday gear can be found at whiteclaw.com/holiday-roast.
