When you’re as funny as Sarah Sherman, laughter comes in a variety of textures. There’s the tidy version that spikes in the space immediately following a punch line; the hesitant, shock value sort that emerges from a crowd taken by surprise; the prolonged, silent, can’t-breathe kind that rises from somewhere deep in the gut—or, in contrast, the trickle of generous, pitying chuckles, exhaled purely to fill the silence in a room.
“My favorite is the screaming kind of laughter—when folks are like, Oh no, I’m appalled, maybe I’m disturbed, but I’m laughing anyway! I can’t help it!” Sherman tells me from her New York apartment, having arrived for our interview hot off what she describes as “a wild two-hour therapy session.” “I’m trying to work through my comedy dysmorphia,” she clarifies, adjusting a pair of oversize wire-frame glasses you might sooner expect to find perched on the nose of an octogenarian law professor. “You know—it’s that thing where I’m convinced no one is laughing at my set, even when they are.”
By the time Sherman—more widely known as “Sarah Squirm”—joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2021, she’d already carved out a space for herself in the stand-up arena. After graduating from Northwestern University in 2015, she went on to host Helltrap Nightmare, a properly vulgar, absurdist, lo-fi comedy showcase based in Chicago, rife with signature Squirm accoutrements (pepperoni nipples, fake eyeballs, severed clay fingers used as tampons). In 2018, she secured a gig writing for The Eric Andre Show before joining André himself on a national stand-up tour. She performed live at Montreal’s famed Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2021. And most importantly, she once chugged a full serving of room temperature clam chowder on stage, mid-set, directly from the can.
Mind you, clam chowder’s not the only potable goop that comedy has ruined for Sherman. “I did this sketch one time where I had to cry slime, so I just put food coloring in a bunch of mayo and shoved it in my eyes. Obviously, it really hurt, and to this day, I still have a weird relationship with mayo because of it,” she admits. Nevertheless, Sherman has no regrets; she’d do it again in a heartbeat. For the sake of humor, no vulgarity is too extreme. “Except for stuff with bananas,” she adds. “I don’t do bananas.”
Crying slime is not exactly a novel stunt for Sherman. Her typical brand of humor skews toward the grotesque. She loves bodily fluids, anything that oozes, vaginas made of pastrami. Her work is often described as “body horror”—a questionable term for a category of performance art designed exclusively to elicit laughter. And yet, time and time again, she pulls it off. “Our whole culture has already normalized body horror in so many ways. I mean, I grew up on Long Island, where girls were getting nose jobs by age 15,” she says. “Maybe it’s cliché to point out, but body horror tends to come extremely naturally to women, whether they know it or not. So we might as well laugh about it.”
The alias “Sarah Squirm” originated when Sherman was in high school, bequeathed to her by a friend because, in proper Squirm parlance, she was “just, like, disgusting.” By 2016, when she began booking stand-up gigs in Chicago with a group of noise bands, “Sarah Sherman” felt rather bland, billed beneath band names like “Forced into Femininity” or “Blood, Liquor, and Fire.” Thus, her nom de guerre was born. “Now that people know me by ‘Squirm,’ it’s sort of like a built-in trigger warning,” she says. “It’s a disclaimer that you’re about to see something gross and alienating...and hopefully funny.”
Poetically speaking, the word squirm is especially apt for Sherman’s style of performance art. To squirm is neither to cringe, nor gag, nor flinch. It’s a modest shimmy, a recognition of the peculiar that still permits plenty of room for entertainment. “These days, going around as ‘Sarah Sherman’ feels kind of like a drag performance,” she says. “I go into work as Sarah Sherman, and I appear on network television, then someone puts me in a wig and I look like a nice mom. But if you buy tickets to see a Sarah Squirm stand-up show, you know you might have to, like, go puke in the parking lot partway through my set.”
That’s not to say that Sherman’s sketches on SNL qualify as tame, exactly. Her most oft-cited skit features a woman covered in singing, anthropomorphic meatballs; equally arresting are her portrayals of Jewish Elvis and the geriatric Six Flags mascot. “Because this is NBC and it’s on network TV, there’s not always room for some of my most abject, gross, body fluid stuff,” she says. “But that won’t stop me from trying.”
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For as long as she can remember, Sherman has been drawn to the revolting. And while it’s true that watching a grown woman with a mullet-adjacent haircut sip room temp soup on stage will not be everyone’s cup of tea (or, you know, chowder), Sherman has long been commended for her dexterity with the distasteful. “My parents have been so supportive of me doing comedy my whole life. They’ve always been front row at all my shows while I’m, like, shoving Hamburger Helper through a papier-mâché butthole,” she says.
Saturday Night Live—the Proust of comedy, the Beatles of network television—carries legendary clout. But it’s no secret that, with the show’s long-standing, unimpeachable stature come waves of popular opinion. “Because the series has been around for so long, there are times when it’s trendy to say that it sucks. And right now, maybe it’s just trendy to say that it doesn’t,” says Sherman, who has been credited for pushing boundaries on the show with her unique version of weird since joining the cast, edging SNL back toward its more punkrock heyday. “But the truth is, these days with all this streaming bullshit, and TikTok, and what have you, the fact that we still make this old-school thing that’s live is pretty amazing. I think people have a nostalgic appreciation for that. I know I do.”
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All the same, admittance into the time-honored cult of the SNL cast carries benefits for Sherman beyond public praise: On a more wholesome note, it operates as a welcome reprieve from the isolating, often soul-shattering intensity of performing stand-up full-time. “Being on SNL feels like being in recovery for all the psychological damage stand-up has caused me. I spent like eight years of my life fucking killing myself on stage—by myself,” Sherman says.
“Sure, SNL is like boot camp—but in a drop-and-give-me-collaboration way. Unlike with stand-up, you’re forced to learn how to work with other people, which isn’t something I would have pushed myself to do otherwise. It’s like comedy rehab. I didn’t realize until now that comedy didn’t have to be lonely.”
The trope of the tortured comedian is a cliché for a reason. Humor, in its purest forms, tends to poke fun at a world that is, at times, impossibly bleak. But that’s not to say that our entertainers owe it to us to double as civic informants.
“Frankly, anyone who gets their political information from a comedian should just fucking read a book,” she jokes, underscoring that she, personally, does not feel pressured to employ her stand-up sets as topical soapbox opportunities. “I’m not trying to inform people or make a statement with my stuff,” Sherman says. “But at the same time, it’s not lost on me that my whole body-horror comedy project has to do with deconstructing all the body violence I’m personally working through as a woman. It’s just that it’s important to clarify: I’m not here to preach. I’m here to tell jokes.”
What Sherman eschews in the political, she bolsters in the kind of empathic discourse that’s at the root of her comedy. In fact, in her hierarchy of laughter, she particularly adores what she calls “the laughter of recognition,” the rare moment when folks bear witness to themselves, in caricature form, within the architecture of a joke—and they’re entertained. “It’s like the time I accidentally forgot there was a tampon already in me, and I shoved another one up there. Then they were stuck. Like, obviously, I was humiliated at the Urgent Care,” she says. “But every time I make a joke about that, people love it. It’s cathartic for me, and it’s cathartic for everyone else.”
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With regard to public appeal, Sherman has a distinction to make. She wants approval—not acclaim—the likes of which she’ll accept in just one currency: laughter (no matter the texture). “Listen, I feel extremely lucky to be in a position where my whole goal in life is to pursue laughter,” she says, scooting—or rather, squirming—toward the edge of her chair. “And you know, sometimes, it feels like the hardest thing in the world. But then I remember that there are people who put on scrubs and do open-heart surgery every day, and I’m just, like, covered in singing meatballs.”
Naturally, humor isn’t always the required form of generic medicine. For Sherman, not even a standing appointment in SNL’s legendary writers’ room can heal all wounds. “I’ve always wanted everyone’s approval desperately... which is why I became a comedian. So after joining SNL, I thought, How could I ever be unhappy after locking in a gig like that? But apparently, I’m still capable of torturing myself,” she shares.
Amid all the self-flagellation, however, there is a (cynicism-free) upshot. “I’m always trying to remind myself that, before the SNL job, I was eternally in a full blackout panic,” she says. “That was the worst feeling in the world—not knowing if I’d ever make it in the front door when all I ever wanted to do was be a comedian. And now, I have a job where I get to be funny— professionally—every day. I’ve never been so grateful for anything.” ❤
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