How to extract parent text from an ajax return data?

How to extract parent text from an ajax return data?

I have the following html data being returned from the ajax request

<div> Log information from the following sessions
            <span class="comments"> your comments </span>
<div>
<div>Section B log information
             <span class="comments"> section B comments </span>
</div>

Here is my attempt to remove all comment classes from this return ajax request but not working and that the comments are not being removed.

$.ajax{
            url: pathToFile
            success: function(data)
            {
                var removeComments = $(data).remove(".comments");
                alert(removeComments).html());
            }
}