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“There’s an epidemic affecting our nation’s young people. The epidemic is fear.”
As I scrolled through Instagram on my ride downtown to the Snapple Island Ferry Comedy Show, a reel from The Free Press popped up. Professor
Arthur Brooks was making the case that “Gen Z is perhaps the most risk-averse generation in history.”
Now, I’m no psychologist. I’m a social media editor. And I theorize that some of that fear Brooks describes comes from our overexposure to a digital world that, seemingly, has all the answers. And when someone makes a decision outside the purview of algorithmic logic — like buying an abandoned ferry for $280,000 at a city auction — they are at the mercy of, well, being completely clowned.
That’s exactly what the news cycle did to Pete Davidson and Colin Jost after they joined a group of investors to buy the decommissioned John F. Kennedy in 2022. Built in 1965, the JFK was the oldest ferry in the Staten Island fleet when it was retired last August due to mechanical failures. Davidson and Jost intended to transform the vessel into a floating entertainment venue.
“Davidson, who’s no longer with SNL, might need to call his agent to book those gigs — turning the 57-year-old ship into a nightspot is likely to cost millions,” The New York Daily News reported. The headline read: “Retired NY Ferry Bought by Pete Davidson and Colin Jost Is Full of Asbestos, Roaches, Say Ex-Crew Members.”
The social media hate laid on thick, too: “Have you heard of the hottest club in the city?” one person tweeted (per the LA Times). “It’s called ‘Tetanus’ and it’s located in the rusted belly of a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry. You’ll dance the night away while also always being just moments away from drowning.”
Years had passed without hearing about the ferry until I got an unexpected email in my inbox: “EMBARGOED: Invite to NYC’s Most Unexpected Comedy Club From Pete Davidson and Colin Jost.”
As it turned out, the “SNL” comedians partnered with Snapple to give New Yorkers an “unexpectedly refreshing break from the daily grind,” transforming their vessel into the Snapple Staten Island Ferry for a free, one-night-only floating comedy show.
Could the comedians have listed tickets for $200 a pop and still packed the ferry? Undoubtedly. Instead, they dropped a limited batch of free tickets at 3 p.m. each day (Sept. 3-8). The resulting buzz and scramble among young New Yorkers to secure tickets (not totally unlike the IMAX 70mm frenzy surrounding “The Odyssey”) was much more valuable than the low six figures a sold-out show might have grossed at the door.
Those lucky enough to make it aboard became a test audience for two brand comebacks, each fiercely looking to win over a younger generation before betting on a much bigger, more calculated swing.
The first is Snapple, which started phasing out its signature glass bottles in 2017, replacing them with plastic (the transition was complete by 2021). The company justified the brand’s “massive makeover” as a decision made “with the evolution of sustainability in mind.” The operational savings from slashing the cost of manufacturing a bottle to roughly a third of what it once was probably looked pretty savory to the big-wig execs at Keurig Dr Pepper. Consumers weren’t as quenched.
Snapple eventually budged in the fall of 2025, launching a limited glass-bottle revival at select bodegas and retailers across New York, citing a “demand for nostalgia from an OVERWHELMING number of consumers.” The brand has yet to commit to a wider or permanent return, but it was clearly testing the waters with this major brand activation.
Hosting Snapple’s revival party was Davidson and Jost’s own comeback project to replenish the New York comedy scene, taking the form of a floating, popsicle-orange vessel. They once played the purchase off as a joke on “SNL,” with Jost quipping, “We thought the whole thing through” (sarcasm implied). But four years later, this one-night-only comedy show offered them a real opportunity to float their idea.
The main room was packed. Because the ferry, naturally, didn’t have one big corridor, an overflow room projected a live feed of the main stage (shaped like a blocky ‘T’).
“You’re media, right?” an event coordinator asked me. “Yes!” I had zoned out. “Then we better put you up here.” She whisked me straight to the front and pointed at two young women, who immediately jolted to their feet and shuffled toward the far end of the bench running parallel to the stage.
“I, uh, I’m sorry I took your seats,” I told the two women as I sidestepped past them. They glanced at each other and giggled. “It’s okay,” one of them said. “Trust me.”
It took me a couple of minutes to figure out what she meant. Then I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the stage: a black barstool, a (glass!) Peach Tea Snapple and a mic stand. I wasn’t just in the front row. I was in the hot seat. The very hot seat, directly under the mic stand. Stage lights beamed down on me, and the ferry cabin itself was extremely muggy. (I guess in Davidson and Jost’s master plan, A/C hit the cutting room floor.)
The room skewed younger millennials and older Gen Z. Most toward the front looked like (or probably were) influencers who’ll look good on camera. Usually, I’ll recognize at least a few media friends in a crowd like this. Not here. I tried making friendly banter with the dude sitting next to me. He was cordial, but his energy read: Nope.
At nine o’clock sharp, the lights went dark. Davidson and Jost emerged from beneath the neon Snapple Island Ferry sign to rapturous applause. This would be the first and last time we’d see the two co-hosts all night.
I’ve encountered Davidson and Jost in the wild before, but this tight vantage point popped any illusion of celebrity. Picture sitting in the front row of a movie theater.
“This is something we’ve wanted to do for like five years, so thank you guys for coming out,” Davidson opened. “And thank you to our sponsor, Snapple.” After holding a beat for the applause, Davidson exclaimed, “The glass is back, baby!”
Jost added: “I also feel like we should acknowledge our former sponsor: my accountant’s suicide note.” He smirked. “Snapple asked me to say this.”
They then turned to the first of three lingering storylines from the news cycle they clearly wanted to address. First, the aforementioned clowning.
“The amount of shit that people have talked,” Davidson said. “Well, suck it!”
“Everyone feeling hot and nauseous? That’s a good feeling,” Jost asked the crowd before moving on to news topic numero dos. “Obviously we’ll get going soon. We’re gonna stop at the Strait of Hormuz.” But when Jost looked over at Davidson to tee up the next punchline, it became clear the geopolitical reference sailed right over his head.
“I like how you thought I would know what that is,” Davidson quipped back. He glanced down at the shot clock. 8:17 remaining. The sweat was palpable.
“I love that this is our body language,” Davidson said, leaning into their candid awkwardness as he and Jost stood marooned on opposite ends of the oversized T-shaped stage. “It’s truly like we’re waiting for someone to start a fight.”
Laughing along with the crowd, Jost admitted, “We don’t know exactly what to do.” The audience roared. That unvarnished honesty, the willingness to take themselves down a notch, clearly resonated with the audience of young people accustomed to spending hours each day swiping through content engineered to mask imperfection.
“We have an incredible show. There are so many great comedians here,” Jost said. “Macklemore is here tonight.” The crowd erupted. Jost stalled on a few uhs, his eyes scanning the room as he debated whether it was worth taking the joke any further.
Davidson took advantage of the moment. “You wanted to make a stance tonight, right?” he poked. “Colin was talking mad shit backstage, dude. He was like, ‘Macklemore doesn’t have shit on what I’m about to say.’”
Red in the face, Jost quickly rowed back to safer waters. “So, in other news…” From there, the remainder of their opener centered on Davidson’s recent concussion. But the lineup of fierce rising comics (with considerably less to lose) didn’t shy away from the insecurities and taboos their Gen Z audience might be too anxious to confront.
Matt Richards, who served as emcee for the night (effectively filling the role many of us presumed Davidson and Jost would play), set the tone for the night by chugging an entire Snapple in one go and then telling a story of how he tried to suck his own penis as a teenager. “Happy to say it didn’t work out,” Richards said. “If it did, I wouldn’t be here.” In an alternate timeline, he’d “live under a bridge and suck my own dick all day.”
As the crowd observed Richards, he gauged their reactions, taking the temperature of how far he could push them. The other comics were about to dive into some risqué material — he was just warming them up.
Richards wiped a bulk of sweat from his forehead. The humidity was becoming hard to ignore. Playfully, he advised Davidson and Jost to sort out the A/C situation before the next show. That’s what I was thinking.
When Chris Rock sat down with Variety’s Selome Hailu for his first in-depth interview since “The Slap,” he recalled “dying a death” during a stand-up set in Oakland in ’96. He was workshopping his controversial “Black People Versus N—s” bit, which would eventually appear in his landmark HBO special “Bring the Pain” that helped catapult Rock into rock-star comic status.
“People wanted to fight because I didn’t have it right yet,” Rock explained in his cover story interview. “You gotta go over the line to find the line. That’s what people don’t understand. When a comedian gets in trouble for saying something at the club, it’s like, ‘Dude, that’s what the club’s for.’”
Overcoming the fear of vulnerability, on both sides of the stage, is what makes the club special. A physical vessel where smartphones, despite the event’s plea for ample social coverage, were repeatedly told to stay tucked away.
At one point, a Staten Island photographer named Sean lowered his camera to snap a portrait on his phone of “Impractical Jokers” star Sal Vulcano mid-set. Vulcano immediately stopped. “No cellphones, sir,” he said. “It’s right up in my face.” Sean held up his DSLR, cutting Vulcano’s budding rant short.
“This guy’s just like- oh, you work here?” Vulcano said, his tone instantly changing. “Okay, you’re not fired. You’re great. I love you.”
Even an Impractical Joker, after hundreds of public challenges and punishments designed to push the limits of embarrassment, could still tense up when a cellphone camera caught him experimenting with a new bit. “That was the ending,” he told the crowd after telling a story about buying health insurance for his newborn. “I thought that would get a bigger laugh.”
The crowd loved it. He was hyper-fixated on grading his performance.
Perhaps that’s why crowd work is so effective. Is there any other setting better designed to experience a flash of public humiliation?
“I like this guy,” Richards said, pointing at me. “You look like a Disney villain.”
“Gaston!” He belted out a Disney song.
Caitlin Peluffo stormed the stage with material in the — let’s call it — advanced workshopping stages. After boldly announcing to the crowd that she was “dropping eggs,” she turned to ask if I knew what ovulating was.
I responded with a sarcastic “Ehh!” and bobbed my head. “Go figure,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect anything less from a man wearing khakis.”
After another minute or two of hyper-sexual jokes, she circled back to me.
“Do you like pussy?”
The camera whipped in my direction.
I froze. Then hit her with the same ambiguous emote.
Why did I just do that? I literally-
“You’re really wishy-washy on the answer, sir.”
“You gotta leave a little mystery.”
“Leave a little mystery?”
Gulp.
“Those pants aren’t leaving any mystery, I’ll tell you that,” she fired back. “You’re not circumcised, I can tell.” The crowd woo-ed. “That’s okay. I like me a full-body boy,” she continued. “I’m not an easy cum. You better crack your knuckles.”
I cracked my knuckles on both hands. She smiled. Peluffo got what she needed from me. Mercifully, she moved on to her next victim.
“Are you a tough cum or an easy cum?” she asked an attractive, reserved young woman. “Which one are you?” I had never seen a face more red in my entire life. “ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION!”
“I’m easy!” she finally blurted out.
“Fuck!” Peluffo shot back. “You’re probably cumming right now.”
On the way out, ferry workers dressed in sailor uniforms were handing departing guests free Snapple. I grabbed a glass peach tea and popped a squat on the pier. It really does taste better.
As I sat there taking in the night, the sound of clinking glass got louder and louder. Sure enough, I spotted a small procession bolting away from the boat with entire cases of Snapple.
I walked over and asked a few of the workers why they were giving them away. A woman with a dyed-blonde bob leaned toward me, lowering her voice.
“Please, take one now and leave before anyone sees you,” she said. “We need to get rid of all of these before the end of the night.”
