For all of the much-needed weirdo adrenaline and absurdity that Sarah Sherman brings to Saturday Night Live — acting casually with singing meatballs protruding from her neck, or portraying 1922’s pointy-eared, silent film Nosferatu irked by 2024’s muscular iteration — nothing mesmerizes more than her stand-up persona, Sarah Squirm.
Beloved for taking outrageous body-horror comedy to extremes, Sarah’s Squirm is a Herschell Gordon Lewis-David Cronenberg splatter-gore-filmfest made flesh, with a cool shag haircut.
“I’ve retained my love and fascination with the abject from childhood,” she says between live dates. “Kids dig up worms and eat their own snot. Kids love Ren & Stimpy, Garbage Pail Kids, Slime Time Live and all that shit. I just never grew up, honestly.”
For all the visceral, improvisational whirr of her live act, she reveals it is scripted down to its punctuation. “That’s my big magic trick. It’s spontaneous in structure and order, but deceitfully messy. When I’m interacting with the audience, it’s mostly prewritten bits that I perform under the guise of spontaneity. I never know what joke I’m going to say next, but whatever it is, it’s written.”
Though she gets away with occasional abstract bloodletting on SNL, that Sarah Sherman is a leaner, meaner comic, dealing with network television standards and practices.
“I’ve learned a lot about comedy and writing at SNL because I’ve figured how to be creative with limitations,” she says. “It’s made me a better joke writer: instead of a punchline being a giant, paper mâché butthole with a snake crawling out of it, I actually have to write a joke. It makes me feel like a real comedian, because I’ve learned new ways of problem-solving. I never thought I’d be able to be a normal woman with long blond hair, but it’s fun to try it in drag at work.”
No live set seems like the previous one, but she has signatures she is fond of. “When I started doing crazy live performances in 2016 in Chicago, I blindfolded an audience member and put their hands in a bucket of live worms. While I no longer physically torture my audience, I describe my live show experience as being trapped in Jigsaw’s torture dungeon with merciful laughter reprieves.”
The idea of where Sherman leaves off and Squirm picks up is something of a pickle. Is Squirm doing and saying things Sherman would not?
“I like thinking of Squirm as a rude, grotesque, asshole version of myself,” Sarah says. “I don’t tell a lot of personal stories about myself because Sarah Sherman isn’t that interesting. Sarah Squirm is outrageous, exaggerates the truth. Sarah Squirm talks about having ‘arms as hairy as Hagrid’s legs,’ which, at its core, speaks to my own insecurities and the horrors of having a human woman’s body. The truth of the matter is… my arms aren’t that hairy.”
