Your body is a joke
You can laugh with it or you can laugh at it, and more with comedian Sarah Squirm
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Does Sarah Sherman dress up as her comedic alter ego, Sarah Squirm, or is it the other way around? Is Sherman the “real,” “normal” Sarah, while Squirm is just an artistic outlet she created to explore her grossest — but strangely engrossing — fears, anxieties and fantasies? Or is Squirm actually the realer of the two, while Sherman is just the semi-civilized mask she puts on?
These are some of the things you might find yourself wondering while watching Sherman’s fantastic new special, Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh, which debuts on HBO this Friday. Some other questions that may occur to you: How long is she going to keep making this noise? I know those long, shriveled labias dangling from her underwear are fake, so why am I screaming at my television in terror at the sight of them? And: How is she able to scramble the distinction so totally between charm and repulsion, humor and horror, introspection and abjection?
Sarah started out as an underground comic, as comfortable sharing sets with noise bands as hitting open mics at the Laugh Factory. Across those contexts, she learned how to navigate a spectrum from Art at its most Punishing on one end to Art at its most Crowd-Pleasing at the other. In her comedy, she likes to mock herself — and the sick, twisted body-shaming American culture that helped produce her — in terms so graphic and gruesome they can start to feel hallucinatory. She is also very funny, and there’s a winning baseline of sincerity and goodnaturedness in her act, too. Not for nothing is she a huge admirer of the late, great Pee-wee Herman, whose influence you can see in her act.
In 2021, in an unexpected twist, she joined the cast of Saturday Night Live, where she’s become best known for playing creatures both freakish (RFK Jr.’s brainworm, slurping from a big sippy cup of brains) and adorable (the viral raccoon who broke into a liquor store and got drunk). If that’s all you know about her, the special might come as a shock. But it’s a great introduction to the uniquely unhinged comedy she’s been doing long before she was on TV.
The other day, I (Jonah) was psyched to get on a SpyLink Transmission with Sarah to talk about the fine line between entertaining people and tormenting them; how we’re all dressed up in some kind of drag or another; what she learned from her grandma’s beautiful hand-painted prosthetic eye; and more unbeatable topics.
Blackbird Spyplane: What’s up Sarah? I see you’re tapping in from the Squirmcave.
Sarah Sherman: “Yeah, I’m sorry there’s clutter everywhere and that you have to look at it. Let me tilt the camera up. I’m always humiliated by my apartment. I’m like, ‘Why don’t I have a better situation, why does everything stink, everything’s dirty, I have s--t everywhere, I don’t open the mail.’” But you’re not my therapist, you don’t care.”
Blackbird Spyplane: We watched your HBO special the other night, and we loved it. We thought it was disgusting, and as the hour went on we made louder and louder disgusted noises. There were actually a few moments where I was at the edge of being, like, ‘I’m out, I’m done.’ Not necessarily moments where you were saying or showing video of repulsive things, but also moments where you’d just stay in an annoying noise for one beat too many. But then you’d go a beat past that, or shift gears, or dig in even deeper, and I was back on board even more than before. I wanted to ask you about finding the balance between entertaining an audience and assaulting them, and about the point where those become the same thing for you?
Sarah Sherman: “I’ve been touring this hour for a long time, and it’s been an exercise in playing with repulsion and attraction. I can repulse people, either with a visual, or a terrible idea, or a terrible noise, but then the whole point of comedy is identification — you’re laughing because you identify or connect with it — so it’s about seeing how far I can push someone before I can pull them back in with a punchline.
“I was afraid to tape it, though, because it’s a very live show. So much depends on the energy in the room every night: I’m feeling out how long I’ll stay in something, or how many times I’ll repeat something, by reading the vibes. So editing this was my Abu Ghraib. It was torture. Because I was, like, ‘What’s the vibe of the room?’ So I’m glad to hear you vocalized disgust, because that mimics the experience of liveness. I’m glad I could come into your living room and provoke a reaction. You’re not just sitting on the toilet watching dead-faced.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Your background as a comedian is interesting, because you started out playing comedy clubs, where people come to be entertained, but at the same time you were doing sets in between noise bands —
Sarah Sherman: “Bands with zero interest in actual entertainment, yeah. Coming up in Chicago I hosted an open mic, I’d do the midnight show for tourists from Indiana at the Laugh Factory, and in that context I had to learn how to write a joke. And then I’d be playing a DIY noise show in a basement, and the aggressive art crap is so ‘no gods, no masters’ that you could go really far without ever being corrected. The comedy clubs forced me to have structure. When someone pays money to see a show, I want to give them their money’s worth. And maybe they’re a nurse who just had a hard shift, so I hope the show’s not just brutal, I hope they’re getting something enjoyable out of it, too.”
Blackbird Spyplane: How has being on Saturday Night Live changed your act?
Sarah Sherman: “It’s funny, my career could have gone in a crazy direction, but then the accident of getting on SNL put a gun to my head and forced me to always come home to a joke. Especially when I tour now, there’s ladies who think I’m just the brown-haired girl from SNL, and they want to have a nice night out with their girlfriends. So I like the surprise of that, when people come and don’t know what to expect.”
Blackbird Spyplane: So much of your comedy is about the body. Thinking about that, it occurred to me that we often relate to our bodies in a way that mirrors the structure of a joke: We care intensely about our bodies, and yet we cover them up and try not to think about them too much, and so that sets us up to be surprised by the reality of them in all kinds of ways. So, like, Chris Farley taking his shirt off is funny, but Ryan Gosling taking his shirt off is funny, too. There’s this similar dynamic of something being hidden, and then the revelation of this truth we’re avoiding, or suppressing, catching us off guard.
Sarah Sherman: “I think that’s why horror and comedy are so well-matched, because in horror you’re seeing the inside stuff on the outside. Someone’s bleeding, their guts are spilling out — horror’s often very funny. And in comedy it’s also just such an old Jewish comedian thing, like, facing the worst part of yourself, you know, Phyllis Diller talking about how she’s aging and her tits are disgusting, with zero repression.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I asked you to share some cherished possessions, and you chose two. What’s the story with this autographed David Cronenberg picture?
Sarah Sherman: “This is the best present anyone’s gotten me. It was a gift from — brag — J.J. Abrams. I got a call from Lorne saying, ‘J.J. Abrams wants your address.’ I was, like, I’m about to get the script for the new Star Wars, f--k all y’all, lose my number, bye. And then it wasn’t a script for Star Wars, it was a signed headshot of David Cronenberg. So, just as good.
“J.J. loves SNL, he’s friends with Lorne and he comes to lots of shows. He saw that my stuff has a lot of practical effects, so we talked about stuff. He has all these, like, Rick Baker prosthetics, I think he owns the orb from Phantasm.”
Blackbird Spyplane: With Cronenberg and the body-horror genre more broadly, on a surface level someone might think it’s purely misanthropic, but I think at its best, it’s the opposite: yes, it’s gnarly and it’s a way to work through all kinds of deep-seated anxieties about ourselves, but it’s also about transformation, about not being trapped in one form. There’s something pro-human about it.
Sarah Sherman: “It’s a coping mechanism. And I hate thinking of comedy as something where I’m working through something and you’re suffering through it, because I want to entertain you. But I can’t deny that all my stuff is rooted in, like, ‘I was a little Jewish girl on Long Island with hairy arms,’ and it’s just me trying to figure out how to like it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The last time you went on Stavros Halkias’s podcast you talked about dressing up “in drag” as a normal, pretty, conventional blonde on SNL. You could argue that we’re all wearing costumes, and that we’re all in drag as something, but I want to know more about how you found your style — you buy pants from literal clown-supply stores and you wear them everyday, not just on stage. How does the way you dress relate to your sense of who you are?
Sarah Sherman: “It’s a continuation of what we were just saying: I see it as an extension of the body. I don’t wake up and it’s a fashion show. I genuinely think it’s who I am. It started when I was growing up. I was obsessed with The Nanny, and Fran was always dressed in bright-and-tight neon Moschino from Filene’s and Loehmann’s. All my aunts were addicted to shopping and going to Canal Street to buy knockoff rainbow Vuitton bags. When I started doing theater in middle school I was close with the lady who ran the costume closet, and I would raid it. There was this ‘80s sequined jacket I got obsessed with.
“And then one time in high school a friend’s dad said to me, ‘Do you dress like this because your parents don’t give you enough attention?’ And that rocked me, because I had never thought it could be bad. I was just wearing hoop skirts from Victorian plays — just having fun.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Some people look at bright colors and bold patterns and say, ‘I don’t have the confidence to wear that.’ Do you see the way you dress as a reflection of confidence, or is it something else?
Sarah Sherman: “I think it can get misinterpreted as armor. I guess, if you think about how we dress in terms of an SNL sketch, Lorne is about stripping people down to bare essentials, because if you see someone in a sketch who’s dressed weird, it’s distracting, it’s odd, and that seems like it’ll be the joke. But I don’t actually feel that way. I feel like dressing like this is the truest form of me.
“There’s an idea that women who fugly themselves up, it’s man repellent, or again, armor, but I think it’s the opposite. In the beginning of the special there’s a stop-motion sequence where I’m created out of a pile of goo, and inside of myself it’s not guts, it’s f--king pom poms and rainbow beads.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That animation is great, who did it?
Sarah Sherman: “My friend Lee, they’re a drag king and a genius who performs as Sweaty Eddie. They make all these animations out of found arts & crafts objects. We met 10 years ago on the internet, both making weird videos.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Spyfriend Adam Sandler is thanked in the credits of the special, too. What did he do?
Sarah Sherman: “Everything. He put me in two movies — I got cut out of Happy Gilmore 2, but no hard feelings. And I tour with him a bunch, and on the tour it’s fun, it’s Sandler and all his friends, punching up each other’s jokes after our sets.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right finally, the other cherished thing you chose is a prosthetic eye that belonged to your grandmother. What’s the story?
Sarah Sherman: “If I was doing an armchair analysis of myself, I’d say maybe some of my fascination with body horror stemmed from my grandma Bea having one of her eyes removed. She had a prosthetic eye sewn in, and she would do this practical joke when I slept over at her house, where she’d take the lens off.
“When you get your eye replaced, they sew a white orb into your head, then the lens is what makes it look like an eyeball: it’s shaped like a shoehorn, and the long end is so you can maneuver it into your head. That’s what this is. It’s hand-painted, all prosthetics like that are, it’s really beautiful. So she’d play this joke where she’d take the lens off and take her dentures out, and I woke up one morning and came down for breakfast, and she just has her white orb in and her teeth out, and it scared the f--king s--t out of me. But it was just a prank, she was just spooking me, and it was legit funny. She was like a comedian. I was little, maybe 5, something like that. But I got so obsessed with this eye.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Hearing that story, where my mind goes is that, whether it’s you in your act, your grandmother playing that prank, Sweaty Eddie doing animations, or David Cronenberg making a movie, you’re all creating different kinds of monsters, bringing these different creatures to life — and the intent is to shock and disgust people, but there’s so much love in it, too.
Sarah Sherman: “That makes me really happy that you say that, because I love making stuff. In the special there’s a video portion at the end where it’s all this blood, and I made a bunch of those videos when I was living in L.A. with no money, like making the bloody hangnail out of wax. I love when things are tactile and arts & crafts. ”
Blackbird Spyplane: Actually making things is fun! Especially if it’s 5-foot-long fake labias for a comedy special.
Sarah Sherman: “Aren’t those labias cool? My friend worked on that part, and I had no idea it was going to look like that. I like when the seams are shown, when you can tell it’s handmade. It’s that same repulsion-attraction thing: ‘I can tell they’re household items, but I’m still repulsed. Why?’ I don’t like when things are slick, I like when you can see the handprint of the artist, and that’s what I just love to do. One thing I struggle with is, when you’re a stand-up, you have to go up every single night, 5 times a night. I miss the time when I used to just sit at home making stuff. That’s my favorite part.”
Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh airs on HBO this Friday, December 12. You can follow Sarah on IG here.
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