Sarah Sherman wants her comedy to be a mix of shock and awe. Mostly shock.
The current “Saturday Night Live” cast member made a name for herself on that show by headlining sketches with heavy effects and body-horror premises. It should come as no surprise that Sarah Sherman fills her HBO stand-up special “Live + In the Flesh” (performed under her stage name, Sarah Squirm) to the brim with gross-out makeup, stop-motion animation and heaps of scatological humor.
“The special is exactly who I am,” Sherman said. “That is the truest expression of myself. What’s fun about my day job, ‘SNL,’ is that’s a lot of drag. I have as much fun as any other drag queen when I do that.”
“Live + In the Flesh” is an assaulting hour of comedy honed from years of touring and lessons Sherman took to pull off the growling and yelling without damaging her voice. At one point in the special, she shows a video of her vocal cords taken when she visited a doctor out of fear that she’d done herself actual harm.
“The doctor was like, ‘You’re fine,’” she said with a note of condescension. “But I was screaming so much. I’m a hypochondriac, as you know from the special.”
An homage to B-movies and cult classics for those with iron stomachs, the special opens with a sequence where Squirm’s stagehand (played by “Pope of Trash“ John Waters) tells a pile of goo and viscera that it’s time to hit the stage before it assembles into Sherman through stop-motion animation. Later, the comedian turns her audience’s attention to a screen featuring a series of DIY models that depict various highly exaggerated nude body parts as Sherman endlessly riffs over the on-screen genitalia.
“That joke pile in the beginning that’s like my body before it forms, that’s what the special is,” Sherman said. “It’s just a pile of crap. But it’s really lovingly crafted, just like that junk pile from the beginning.”
I made the excellent decision of watching this special while I ate dinner.
I was going to say, I hope you didn’t watch it while you were eating.
No, it was fine. It was great. Tell me about your unique brand of stand-up comedy, where you’re folding in all these practical effects and body horror.
I like performing comedy, but I also like making weird little videos. I was doing that show for a long time, and basically by the time that I would get exhausted on stage from my screaming and flailing around a lot, I would then put on the video and catch my breath or whatever — which is funny, because that’s when everybody loses the ability to catch their breath because they’re gasping.
Is there a part of you that looks at the gross-out stuff as an endurance test, or do you just want to find people who are all in?
I like making a room loud. I’m a comedian, so I need to hear laughs or else the bottomless black hole in my heart will not be full. But I also like hearing shock and awe. I like a rowdy room. I like stirring up a frenzy, so the best shows are where people have been laughing for 40 minutes and then you switch to the shock-and-awe portion of the show and people are going, “No! Noooo!”
My opener, Jack Bensinger, who’s like my best friend and writes at SNL, has footage of people walking out of my shows in droves because I’m playing a video of a prolapsed hemorrhoid mouth.
Talk to me a bit about building those models and effects.
All of the video segments were things that I made on my own at some point. There’s a video segment that’s just the blood stuff—that’s all stuff that I made in a garage in L.A. with no money, shot on an iPhone. The hangnail’s made out of wax, the zit is made out of bubble wrap…
Then when I started doing “SNL” and had a little money from the show, I was able to pay for my friend Izzi Galindo, who lives down the street from me. He had done a bunch of crazy special-effects makeup for my friend Alan Resnick, who’s a weirdo comedian, and he did the prosthetics for this movie “Sick of Myself,” and I was a big fan. We had just met, and I was like, “Hey, do you want to make a long labia for me?”
How did John Waters get involved?
I sent him a letter! I drew a little postcard that had intestines on it, and I drew a picture of the pile of blood and guts, and I was like, “This is going to be your scene partner. It’s just my skeleton in a puddle.” Then one day I got a call from an unknown number with a Baltimore area code.
At one point in this special, it sounds like you don’t take a breath for three minutes as you run through one-liners about different parts of your body. How do you train for that?
Honestly, it’s just what happens when I tour the same show for so long. Instead of pruning away older jokes, I’m just jamming new stuff into it. I think I’ve fallen victim to looking at online comments being like, “There’s no jokes in this; she’s just saying the same thing over and over again.” I’m like, “How dare you!” There’s such a density that it’s easy to take it for granted.
I heard that you got an email from HBO asking if those were your real genitals.
Yeah, because they had to legally. I was just like, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but no, guys.” It’s funny. I understand that someone has to ask legally if there’s nudity in it, but I’m like, “How crazy do you guys think I actually am?
This story first ran in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
