Sarah Sherman
“I want to do karaoke — I want to eat crazy fried chicken, I want to do everything,” Sarah Sherman tells the Scene by phone.
Sherman, aka Sarah Squirm, has been to Nashville only once. That was when she was on tour with Eric André, and she was in and out in less than a day. She has more time on her current tour — which brings her to The Basement East on July 9 — and she plans to make the most of it.
The comic, who specializes in body-horror comedy, joined Saturday Night Live as a featured player in 2021 and gained repertory status in 2023. Before SNL, she was known for her disgusting and hilarious DIY videos.
“Everything has to be a joke,” she says. “That’s the power of comedy. I repulse people, I’m pushing them away, and then I bring them back with the identification point of laughter. Even if I’m experimenting with freaking people out, I’ve got to get them back with some laughs. It’s that repulsion-and-attraction thing.”
Sherman has fun at SNL, but says she also takes ideas she couldn’t make work on the show and uses them in her act. Stand-up is a way to let loose over the summer and do the things she can’t do on network television — but not everyone who comes to her show understands that.
“I’ll do a comedy club in Wisconsin and get a family of four 70-year-olds who are like, ‘Oh, we want to go to the comedy club this weekend and see the brunette from SNL, that’ll be fun,’” Sherman says. “And then they get there and they’re like, ‘What the fuck? This is not — I thought this was the nice woman from the show that we like.’”
To mitigate this, Sherman makes her promotional material match the vibe of her stand-up. Take, for instance, the poster for this tour. “Sarah” is dripping with eyeballs, “Squirm” is made out of intestines, there’s a severed finger, Sherman’s eyes are hanging out of her head, and part of her brain is visible.
“I don’t want to spoil anything, but it gets really horrible — it’s really loud and really unpleasant,” she says with a laugh. “But it’s so fun. I promise. It’s fun. Like, my friend Tommy ran out of my show in Portland and was puking in the parking lot.”
Recently an elderly woman came to one of Sherman’s shows and said in all her years she’s never seen anything like this, which Sherman took as the ultimate compliment. Sherman also says she’s grateful that SNL has given her a larger platform. Before she joined the cast, she was known for an outrageous DIY style in her work, most notably superimposing her mouth over a butt to … look like a butthole. She says she and her friends had a lot of fun making weird stuff before SNL, but now she’s grateful to work with people who have been in the business for decades.
“I was a fan of Louie Zakarian’s work from before SNL because he used to do all these crazy Troma movies,” Sherman says of the show’s longtime makeup artist. “We did this sketch called ‘The Anomalous Man’ where I was this weird mythical creature. He made this crazy face for me in a day. Then last-minute, we did a rewrite where I had a hunchback with an eyeball on it. So he whipped that up in like a minute. It was crazy. He’s amazing. These people are amazing.”
For every family of four who walks out of Sherman’s live show, or pukes in the parking lot, there are dozens of fans waiting to come up to her after the show or on the streets of New York and connect with her — by showing her the grossest thing in their camera roll.
“Literally people will be like, ‘Oh my God, you love body horror — I sliced open my face when I fell off a tractor, and I think you would love it,’” Sherman says. “Like, ‘Oh, my God, you would love this picture of my face getting ripped off by a bear.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa!’”
When asked what stand-up performers she enjoys, Sherman puts a pair of comics on our radar: Richard Perez in New York and Alex Grelle in Chicago. In one of his shows, Grelle reenacted the sex scene from Brokeback Mountain while singing “The Killing Moon,” and Sherman calls it the best thing she’s ever seen.
Then, like many a well-intentioned visitor, Sherman asks about Lower Broad.
“I want to go to the Kid Rock honky-tonk,” she says.
The Scene tells her that might not be such a good idea — that it’s not the same kind of tourists New York gets. It’s a really different kind. A worse kind.
“You’re actually really intriguing me,” she says. “You’re actually doing more to intrigue me. It makes me want to go more. … I’m going.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misquoted Sherman as saying her "friend's mommy" puked after her show. The puker was her friend Tommy. We apologize for the error.
