SNL’s Sarah Sherman unleashes her comedy alter ego Sarah Squirm for an hour of “body horror” standup that is not for the faint of heart
To viewers of Saturday Night Live, she’s Sarah Sherman, member of the cast since 2021. Known for her frequent appearances on Weekend Update, hilariously roasting anchor Colin Jost, she’s also impersonated such celebs as The Nanny’s Fran Drescher, Senator Chuck Schumer and The View’s Joy Behar, while introducing out-there characters including a demonic baby, a woman with a singing meatball growing out of her neck and an office worker who underwent cosmetic surgery to replace her normal eyeballs with crazy-looking googly ones.
Fans of cutting-edge comedy, however, may be familiar with her alter ego, Sarah Squirm, reigning queen of gross-out “body horror” humour. It’s that persona who’ll be marking her TV debut in a new HBO comedy special, Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh. Recorded in Brooklyn this summer, the special finds Sherman in rare form, roasting members of the audience while riffing on various bodily functions, accompanied by animated sequences that will test even the strongest of stomachs.
As Sherman explained during a recent press conference (moderated by SNL alum Aidy Bryant), the Sarah Squirm character developed while she was honing her comedy chops onstage in Chicago. “I was doing this show. It was called Hell Trap Nightmare where I could get my little freak flag flying. Chicago has a big noise music scene, so we would do these shows that was like half-crazy noise musicians. My friend Jill would do this electronic act called Forced into Femininity where she would have a bag of crickets, live crickets, and shake them in people’s faces,” she recalls.
According to Sherman, viewers who tune into her special will see that she wears her influences on her sleeve. “You know, I think from the special it’s clear that the influences are like Pee-wee Herman and I totally ripped off the Tales from the Crypt intro. All of the things that I love are very evident in the special.”
The special opens with a cameo appearance from director John Waters, dubbed “the Pope of Filth” for his bizarre and outrageous movies such as Pink Flamingos and Mondo Trasho. The intro also features a stomach-churning Pee-wee’s Playhouse-inspired animated sequence in which her body reconstitutes itself from the inside out, a sequence that Sherman compares to the denouement of Demi Moore’s The Substance. “It’s like starting as a pile of guts, ending as a pile of guts,” she says. “The whole thing is the humiliation of having a body . . . Sarah Squirm is like a cartoon person, so my boobs were made of disco balls and Funfetti and whatever.”
As viewers will see, Sherman incorporates a lot of physical comedy into the show, something she says requires significant pre-show preparation — particularly stretching. “You have do as much prep as you do whatever. I even do voice stuff . . . it is an athletic show. Like, it involves a lot of breath and screaming.”
Sherman is also accompanied onstage by an assortment of foot pedals, the kind that guitarists use in concert to change tone and add effects. For Sarah Squirm, however, each pedal emits a specific sound, ranging from a bone-chilling howl to the Seinfeld theme. “And the reason those pedals became a part of my show was because I was screaming so much, I was losing my voice. And I was like, ‘OK, so how do metal screamo guys do it?’ They have, like, distortion and effects. So now I can scream because of like all these like effects without hurting myself. Because, you know that our voice is our instrument.”
Creating comedy from the indignities of the human body was a concept that emerged for Sherman early on. “You know, I’m an Ashkenazi Jewish girl, grew up on Long Island. Girls were getting nose jobs for their 15th birthday. And I was being like, ‘Well, that’s horrifying,’ ” she says, explaining how that impacted her. “My most recurring nightmare is that I’m nine months pregnant and I give a violent birth to an ice baby with wires coming out of their head.”
Viewers will also be struck by her fashion, a singular sense of style, that is wild, colourful and outrageous — and, she reveals, inspired by Fran Drescher in The Nanny. “I was obsessed with The Nanny,” she says. “Then my aunt would take me to Filene’s Basement because that’s where she would get all of her discount Moschino, you know what I mean? Like, I’m a Jewish girl from Long Island and that’s how I dress.”
These days, Sherman has amassed a veritable “costume wing” in her closet. “There’s a bunch of clown bow ties in there,” she says. “I was actually paranoid that my costume in the special was, like, normal. Because there’s so much moving around. I couldn’t have like a bunch of layers, and I was sweating a lot. And I was also, there was a moment when I was like, wait, [scoffing] this shirt is white.”
Asked why Live + In the Flesh landed at HBO, as opposed to Netflix or any of the other streamers that host standup comedy specials, she offered a surprising response. “I was pitching the special around, I’m asking for money to do a lot. I was doing presentations where I’d be like, ‘I have animation,’ and I’m like, ‘OK, and then we would go through this graveyard and then the zombie hand would come out and then be like, ‘Free sample,’ and people are just like [confused look],” she recalls. “And HBO is just like, ‘Yeah, OK.’ They’re like [shrugging] ‘Yeah.’ You know? Because people are, ‘Oh, it’s a standup special, like how complicated could that be? Here’s like 12-and-a-half dollars.’ But sometimes things don’t always have to be like that.”
According to Sherman, her SNL boss Lorne Michaels has not seen her special yet — and she’s not sure she actually wants him to. “He said, ‘Whatever I can do to help you, I will.’ And in the back of my mind, I’m going, ‘Does he know that at the end of the special, my mouth becomes a hemorrhoid?’ ” she quips.
Despite its inherent edginess, Sherman is insistent that Live + In the Flesh is still mainstream entertainment, not avant-garde performance art. “My worst fear is people see a poster or an ad for the special and they think ‘This is just for bisexuals in Brooklyn, this is not for me,’ ” she jokes.
That said, she admits that she does tend to regularly experience audience members walking out of her performances during some particularly gross bits. “Usually by the time the butthole comes out, and the hangnail comes out, I lose people. I do,” she says. “But just as long as you have a foundation and a bedrock of jokes with actual punchlines, you can get away with anything.”
Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh airs Friday, December 12, on HBO Canada