Puppeteer install fails on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - puppeteer

Question

I am trying to install puppeteer on a VPS hosted by Linode (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).
I run npm install puppeteer and run into the following error:
unhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: /home/kekearif/meh/node_modules/puppeteer/lib/cjs/puppeteer/install.js:138
catch {
^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token {
at createScript (vm.js:80:10)
at Object.runInThisContext (vm.js:139:10)
at Module._compile (module.js:616:28)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:663:10)
at Module.load (module.js:565:32)
at tryModuleLoad (module.js:505:12)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:497:3)
at Module.require (module.js:596:17)
at require (internal/module.js:11:18)
at download (/home/kekearif/meh/node_modules/puppeteer/install.js:35:7)
(node:11036) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection. This error originated either by throwing inside of an async function without a catch block, or by rejecting a promise which was not handled with .catch(). (rejection id: 1)
(node:11036) [DEP0018] DeprecationWarning: Unhandled promise rejections are deprecated. In the future, promise rejections that are not handled will terminate the Node.js process with a non-zero exit code.
meh#1.0.0 /home/kekearif/meh
└── puppeteer#5.3.0 extraneous
npm WARN ws#7.3.1 requires a peer of bufferutil#^4.0.1 but none was installed.
npm WARN ws#7.3.1 requires a peer of utf-8-validate#^5.0.2 but none was installed.
npm WARN meh#1.0.0 No description
npm WARN meh#1.0.0 No repository field.
Any ideas how to fix this?