You’ve come to know and perhaps love Sarah Sherman over the past five seasons of Saturday Night Live, where she might be jostling Colin Jost one weekend, starring in a surreal sketch, playing it straight, or perhaps even all three in a single episode. But before she landed SNL, Sherman’s onstage stand-up came under an even more bonkers persona: Sarah Squirm. Lest you doubt the moniker, she will test your sense of humor and your sensibilities over the course of her first hour special, which lands not on NBC or Peacock, but on HBO.
The Gist: In her salad days, Sherman was an Adult Swim Fixture, writing for both Three Busy Debras and for The Eric Andre Show, as opening for Andre on tour. She more recently has toured with Adam Sandler, with whom she co-starred in the 2023 Netflix film, You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! The Sandman also has cast her in the upcoming Netflix feature, Roommates.
But for her HBO debut, filmed earlier this year at The Bell House in Brooklyn, Sarah Squirm tapped the one-and-only John Waters to star in her special’s opening sketch, with Waters finding her all blood and bones on the floor backstage, the antithesis of put together. The sketch sets the stage for her hour of self-deprecating body horror humor, mocking not just her looks but her sex organs and bodily fluids, sometimes talking about it, and other times displaying graphic videos of her altered insides and outsides.
Waters hypes her up backstage by saying: “Go out there and remind them why God invented the barf bag!”
What Comedy Special Will It Remind You Of? Think Pee-wee Herman meets John Waters meets The Substance. If you need a more specific stand-up comedic influence, remember that Sherman worked for Eric Andre before landing SNL.
Memorable Jokes: Could you imagine seeing her dressed and made up as Sarah Squirm knocking on your door in early pre-pandemic 2020 asking you to vote for Bernie Sanders?
Could you imagine her Long Island father trying to make sense out of her comedy or her boyfriend?
Could you imagine her in the latest athleisure, trying to work out next to you in the gym?
Those are perhaps some of the kinder more Safe For Work premises she puts in your hand. But almost always, it comes back to sex and excrement. Her opening minutes she flips the double bird at everyone and lets out a prolong rant about how explosive her diarrhea is. Surprised?! “What kind of comedy show did you think you were seeing tonight?” she says. Later, she doubles down on everything, no matter what she has to say to audience members who are only all-too-willing to stand up and be roasted by her. “Grow up, get a job like me, professional poop clown!”
In the back end of her hour, so to speak, she goes past words into moving pictures, sharing video purportedly of the inside of her vocal cords. She’ll follow that up with an extended bit depicting her at the beach, completely nude save for some extremely distorted additions to her breasts and vagina.
Can a guided meditation bring it all home in one piece?
Our Take: “We’ve seen a lot of things we can’t unsee. I’ve said a lot of things I can’t unsay.”
That includes not just the kind of anything goes gross-out humor that made her keep her childhood nickname and adopt it for comedy before getting SNL. But this also is the unvarnished, uncensored look inside the comedian’s brain — and literally, figuratively inside her body, too. And she never really lets up. It’s full speed ahead. She puts her foot to the proverbial pedal as well as a quite literal one, with a recurring gag queuing up the jazzy theme from Seinfeld, and at other times demonstrating her version of ASMR. Or even using sound and light to pretend audience members are venturing into a deep, dark cave, looking “for a decent joke” out of her.
There are moments when her balls-out commitment lends a comparison to Emma Stone’s character this year in Bugonia. I’m not suggesting Sarah Sherman or even Sarah Squirm are extraterrestrial, mind you.
But she is deliberately coming straight at you with the kind of full force that you would never see on network TV, not even late-night on SNL. Nor could you imagine this kind of comedy special getting picked up or aired on Netflix, even.
That said, her SNL boss Lorne Michaels does have his executive producer hands in the mix here along with his Broadway Video shingle. Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein are part of this production, too. It seems everyone wants in on the Sarah Squirm action. Her humor might not be ready for primetime, but it is great for the comedy business.
Our Call: As long as you know what you’re getting yourself into, STREAM IT to see what Sherman is like outside of the constraints of NBC and 30 Rock. Just note it might not be a great idea to eat or think about eating while watching this!
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.