Sarah Sherman knows that she’s gross. But she still needs you to laugh.
As a breakout star on Saturday Night Live, Sherman is often featured as the “freak of the week” on “Weekend Update”—playing notable characters inspired by headlines, such as “Drunk Raccoon That Broke Into a Liquor Store,” Punch the Monkey’s deadbeat mom and Kristi Noem’s husband, complete with a giant breastplate.
With regular appearances in both absurd prerecorded pieces and live sketches, Sherman has established herself as a staple within the SNL cast. But in her most recent comedy special, Sarah Sherman: Live + in the Flesh, which premiered on HBO last December, audiences see a different, more repulsive side of Sherman.
“It’s a more rude, abrasive, disgusting version of what [audiences] see on SNL,” she told Newsweek in an interview for our Newsmakers Impact series. “I think some people have been very shocked of what monstrosity I’m capable of.”
The special begins with a poop joke, setting the tone of blue humor, and includes a mix of standup, short videos and drawn-out bits and act-outs.
“I like to see how far I can push something,” Sherman said. “If you tell a butthole joke for two minutes, maybe you’ll lose some people. But if you push it to four minutes, maybe you win people back again, because it’s just so crazy.”
Her influences are clear. Live + in the Flesh features a cameo from iconic director of Pink Flamingos and “Pope of Trash” John Waters, as well as a stage setup that looks like a perverted, twisted version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse—complete with bright colors, giant eyeballs and prosthetics that evoke the aesthetics of ’90s claymation and Nickelodeon cartoons.
This sort of vivid world is where a zany maximalist like Sherman feels most at home. Her fans come for the jester-like antics and spectacle onstage. But if audiences look past the DayGlo aesthetic, body hair and crass punchlines, they’ll recognize that her material speaks to a pretty universal experience: navigating life as a human, both in our bodies and in a society that seems to shame us all for existing.
For years before she joined the cast of SNL, Sherman went by her alternate comedic persona, Sarah Squirm, which is still her Instagram handle. With this latest special, fans get a peek into Squirm’s colorful yet grotesque world of goop, gore and guts. Her pre-SNL standup material was raunchy and raw; she’d literally and figuratively spill her guts onstage, leaving audiences a little queasy but unable to look away.
“Sarah Squirm is obviously the thing that I’m most comfortable with, and I think that sometimes comes out on SNL … but it’s also a less vulnerable persona,” Sherman told Newsweek. “I don’t know if I would’ve had a career outside of doing bar shows as Sarah Squirm. Whenever I’m in a blonde wig [on SNL], my friends call it ‘Sarah Normal Activity,’ because for people watching the show at home, that is more what a human being looks like, even though it’s an alien to all my friends.”
Sherman doesn’t come from a sketch comedy background, but she’s logged five seasons on SNL. Even with all that experience, the legendary sketch series doesn’t suddenly become less demanding.
“SNL is a really hard job, I always feel like it’s the first day of the job every day, so if anyone’s pitching me anything, I’m so open-minded [which] pushes me into areas that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of [myself].”
At 30 Rock, her favorite collaborators aren’t in the writer’s room, but in the makeup department.
“I’ll send [Louis Zakarian, the head of special effects makeup] a crazy drawing and say, ‘Can you make my eyeballs look like this?’ and then in like five seconds he already has a clay sculpture of my head with eyeballs bugging out,” she said.
The costume, makeup and props departments not only enable the visuals for her kooky “Weekend Update” characters, but they also help inform who the characters are and how she plays them.
“I feel like my range is so limited that anything that can help me expand my range [is welcome],” she said. “Even getting fangs for Nosferatu, it like made me change my voice and my physicality. That’s why I love hair, makeup, costume props so much, because they give you new things to play with that you wouldn’t have come out of the gates with.”
In her standup, Sherman intercuts the shocking potty humor with more serious topics, like attending therapy three times a week, her Jewish identity and her progressive politics. Sherman grew up on Long Island with “a bunch of angry, judgy, really funny Jews” idolizing Fran Fine on The Nanny for “keeping everything bright, tight, loud and Jewish.”
“She’s kind of my north star for comedy performance, just being so fabulous and glamorous,” Sherman said. “I know watching my special, ‘glamour’ might not be the first word that comes to mind, but that’s my version of glamour—it’s like a giant clown tie with a lot of rhinestones on it.”
Her Jewish identity also had a profound impact on shaping her politics at a very young age. In the special, she notes, “I’m a cool Jew, I support a free Palestine; of course I do, I’m Jewish and it’s free,” before buttoning the joke with the bass line theme from Seinfeld. She said she was forced into political consciousness at a young age because of her religion.
“Hippie Jews throughout history have always been very outspoken about politics and I think I was forced into having political awareness just because being a young Jewish person, you’re forced to contend with Israel at a very young age,” she said. “I’m like 12, 13, people trying to peer pressure me to go to Birthright, not really understanding the politics of that, but I knew I had a political [misalignment] with it.”
She continued, saying, “That was the first time I was forced into political consciousness, developing my own personal opinion about my religious Jewish identity, my Jewish cultural identity and then having a forced regional identity with a country that I’d never been to or had a relationship with.”
While she doesn’t label herself as a “political comedian,” Sherman believes that being a woman is inherently political. Her Live + in the Flesh special touches on gross things most women deal with but seldom discuss publicly—like body hair, abortion and bleeding.
“I think a lot of the special is about female body standards, like the cruel, unusual lengths we have to go to conform to whatever body standards,” she said. “I’m not trying to be all serious about it, but I read everything online. I see people being like, ‘Oh, a female comedian talking about her period and her labia.’ It’s like, how many times do you see a male comedian talking about dating being kind of weird?”
To cut through some of the tension these jokes might create, Sherman also employs a self-deprecating humor that levels the power balance with the audience and builds trust on both sides of the mic. She likened watching standup to a tightrope walk or Alex Honnold of Free Solo fame—it grabs the audience’s attention because of the allure of watching someone who might fall.
“I’m pretty aggressive with the audience and I roast them a lot, so I try to meet them where they’re at,” she said. “I’m being tongue-in-cheek and I try to use self-deprecation to show them that I can be just as mean to myself as I’m being to them.”
While her racy subject matter and loud wardrobe might suggest an I-don’t-care-what-anybody-thinks attitude, she’s still just a girl from Long Island who goes to therapy and wants to win over every audience—whether they’re live in studio, sitting in a crowded comedy club or on their living room couch.
“I’m in an interesting position because I deal with a lot of repulsive subject matter, so I’m purposely repelling people away from me, whether it’s talking about my butthole or looking like a freak, my form of artistic expression is repulsion,” she said. “But ultimately, I’m a comedian and I’ve wanted to be a comedian my whole life. So there’s a black bottomless void inside of me that needs constant validation. Because when I’m onstage, I do need to hear an audience laugh or I’m going to slice my own head off.”
Watch Newsweek‘s interview with Sherman, for our Newsmakers Impact series, above.
