Sarah Sherman on Comedy, SNL, and Her Love of the Grotesque

Sarah Sherman is in the makeup chair at Saturday Night Live, morphing into a five-eyed, giant-eared beast. Since she joined the show in 2021, SNL’s makeup artist, Louie Zakarian, has transformed her into the Six Flags mascot, covered her in meatballs, and turned her real eyes into googly ones. That was all for sketches; today, though, they’re just experimenting. “Originally, my pitch I was gonna send you for this was, like, pimples that are eyeballs. But my face doesn’t have that much surface area,” Sherman says as Zakarian sticks prosthetic ears with eyes in their lobes to the sides of her head. He adds an extra eye to her forehead, applying thin layers of color until the latex around it is indistinguishable from Sherman’s skin.

“There are certain actors that you could put whatever you want on them and they don’t transform,” Zakarian says. “She just transforms.”

“I have kind of a ‘no’ face,” agrees Sherman. “I don’t have crazy-distinct features.” Once the makeup is applied and pictures are taken, Zakarian removes the ears and lets Sherman keep them as a memento. She leaves the eye on her forehead as she walks out, and no one at 30 Rock seems to notice. On her, that kind of thing has started to look natural.

Sherman is a 29-year-old body-horror comic who has been playing with detached eyeballs and exploding buttholes since she started performing stand-up in Chicago under the name Sarah Squirm. She finds glory in gore: In May 2021, shortly before she was cast on SNL, she made a video called “The Sarah Vaccine,” in which she made a concoction of “gasoline, juice, and the special ingredient … piss,” then drank it. “I did a show in Portland,” she says, “and my friend Tommy had to walk out in the middle to puke in the parking lot.” (She considers this an accomplishment.)

Sherman and Colin Jost on SNL’s “Weekend Update.”
Photo: SNL/NBC

On SNL, she’s an agent of chaos. Rather than tackling current events or playing with modern archetypes as her colleagues do, Sherman has managed to remain disgusting, strange, and confrontational. She’s known for playing a version of herself on “Weekend Update” in which she goads Colin Jost — as in a segment where she asks him why there are no Jews at SNL. When he replies that there are Jews on the show, including her, she turns to the camera and says, “In other news, local wet blanket Colin Jost is keeping track of the amount of Jews at SNL.” In one of her most famous sketches, she plays a woman who reveals to her date that she’s covered in anthropomorphic meatballs that sing and spit bile. The sketch required Sherman to use her “no” face to play a seemingly normal pretty girl, but she’s more at home as the meatball. “The whole sketch is me being really straight and being on a date with Chris Redd,” she says. “That was impossibly hard for me to do.”

She knows what people expect to hear about her past, and she bristles at it: “I think a lot of people like to romanticize comedians being outsider romantic losers.” Sherman grew up in Great Neck on Long Island. She was odd but not off-puttingly so. She held her bat mitzvah on April Fools’ Day (she claims the date was not intentional, just a “gift from God”) and sent invitations in the form of snakes in a can. She wore hoopskirts to class and pilfered her school’s costume closet; she still has an ’80s jacket covered in rainbows, stars, and moons that the costumer gave her. A member of the high-school improv team, she had always been attracted to the grotesque but hadn’t yet found the right way to express it. One time she painted a picture of a baby bottle full of intestines. If she were a character on Glee, she would have been slushied. In real life, she ran track.

“I had friends, I was well liked, I was funny,” she says. “I’m a comedian, so I needed people to like me.” That hasn’t changed: “I have a deep, dark desire within me to be accepted by others. I also have the desire to make things that are insane. But the part of me that wants to make things that are insane still desperately needs people to like it.”

Photo: Charlie Engman

At Northwestern, where she went to college, Sherman didn’t make her desired improv team. “Ruined my life,” she says. “Eyeliner streaks down the face, looking out a rainy window being like, I’m moving to Seattle.” But that gave her time to fall in love with stand-up, which allowed her to be totally herself and instantly perform any idea she had. (One of her first jokes: “I guess I feel bad that my roommates have to live with me till the lease is up, but who’s the real victim here? I have to live with me forever!”) After graduating, she stuck around Chicago and became friends with people like the actress and comedian Meg Stalter, soon learning that she could combine her love of comedy with her love of the gag-inducing. (A joke from this period: “Some women can be described as a tall glass of water. Honey, I’m more like a tall glass of clam chowder.” Then she would chug a can of clam chowder.)

She adopted the stage name Sarah Squirm, inspired by a high-school nickname. A couple of her friends ran a record label and booked her for gigs as a comedian alongside a bunch of noise musicians. “I was doing basement shows with bands literally called Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan. I was like, ‘It can’t be Blood Licker, Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan, and Sarah.’” When she started her own noise-and-comedy show, Helltrap Nightmare, the poster included an illustration of, as she describes it, “a uterus where the eggs were eyeballs, the smile was an open vagina, the lips were made out of intestines, and there was a severed finger as a tampon in it.”

Sherman moved to L.A. in 2019. A couple of years later, she booked the Just for Laughs comedy festival and did a set that included talking about wanting to fuck her dad and her “pastrami-like pussy lips” — which promptly scored her an SNL audition. She had been asked to do some showcases for SNL producers a few years before and attempted some character-based work; according to her, she “fucking sucked.” This time around, she gave them her stand-up instead. “It was grotesque,” she says. “I talked about tying my nipples together with my long nipple hair.” A few months later, she was on the show.

For an “alternative” comic (a term Sherman is reluctant to apply to herself), she has an old-school, workmanlike attitude about comedy. “If someone’s a nurse and they’re going to the Comedy Cellar on a Thursday night and they paid $30 and a two-drink minimum to be there, give them a show,” she says. She dresses about the same onstage and off: Today she’s wearing heavy black boots that stick out from under a pair of blue, orange, and pink patchwork pants (“I have a lot of pants from a store that sells professional clown clothes”) with an acid trip of a shirt layered beneath a crocheted rainbow vest. Her hair is a black mullet, and she once described herself on “Weekend Update” as looking like “Chucky went to Sarah Lawrence.” Despite dressing like the mascot of Bushwick Pride, Sherman tells me she is “straight like a Jets football player.” As she crowed on “Update,” “That’s right, America, I have a boyfriend. Don’t let the queer haircut fool you, honey!” At a recent stand-up show where she performed alongside Patti Harrison and Stalter, Sherman ran around the stage with her fist in the air saying, “Straight power!” Some comedy elders have claimed political correctness is killing the form; for the most part, Sherman shocks audiences with work so absurd and graphic that it exists outside the outrage machine entirely.

Photo: Charlie Engman

Her persona now has two levels: Sarah Sherman, who’s just excited to wear googly eyes on-air, and Sarah Squirm, who drinks piss. She hopes to make viewers turn away in disgust but then turn back because she’s making them laugh. “What’s fun now that my audience is broader is that people come to my show thinking, I know Sarah Sherman from TV. She has nice brown hair. Then they come to my show and they’re like, Oh my God. They’re all horrified.” This past October, she performed at the University of Connecticut Family Weekend, where the school billed her as “Sarah Sherman (a.k.a. Sarah Squirm).” She says she bombed so badly that a heckler received “basically a standing ovation.”

She’s no longer sure which name she wants to go by. While she’s caught somewhere in between, she’s fielding other calls. On New Year’s Eve, she was in a sketch with Dolly Parton on Miley Cyrus’s NBC special, and she’ll play a rabbi in the upcoming Adam Sandler Netflix movie You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! Most days, though, she works on making Squirmy content safe for network. In a November “Weekend Update” segment of which she is especially proud, Sherman lusted after John Fetterman, who had just been elected senator from Pennsylvania, saying he “gives the turkey wattle between my legs something to be thankful for!” The onscreen graphic showed a cartoon of a wobbling turkey neck.

“It did well enough at the run-through that we got away with being able to not only tell the joke but use the picture,” she says. “When that fucking turkey wattle that looked like a raggedy pussy lip finally got on TV and was flapping in the breeze, I was like, Period. End of story.”