Sarah Sherman on Body Horror, Growing Up on Long Island and her SNL journey
Words: Sihaam Naik | Photographer: Elizabeth Renstrom | Creative Direction: Ione Gamble and Sarah Sherman | Styling: Gabriel Held | Hair: Davey Matthew | Makeup: Mollie Gloss | SFX: Louie Zakarian | Videographer: Paul DeSilva | Polyester videographer: Irmak Akgur | Sea Creature: Hunter Saling | Werewolf: Cory Lane | Location: NYC Film Locations | Photography assists: Jesse Mico & Colin Shields
Make it stand out
When Sarah Sherman dials into our call, she’s sporting a yellow Gumby shirt layered under a rainbow crochet knit, topped off with a Von Dutch cap and striking bright eyeshadow. The comedian’s rugged mullet adds to the ensemble, which evokes hemp milk-master puppeteer art-school-teacher chic, rather than a celebrated comedian on America’s longest-running comedy skit show. Dubbed “clown attire,” her unique style has resulted in a coveted show invite from Susan Alexandra, earned her a coveted closet tour in The Cut, as well as an editorial with cult clothing company Fashion Brand Company. She’s a breath of fresh air at Saturday Night Live, where a body horror comedian like her has never graced the stage.
Sure, we’ve seen the odd unconventional comedian like Tim Robinson or Kyle Mooney - but none brave enough to commit to the bit like Sarah has been able to. While Robinson felt like he had to tone down his voice for SNL, Sherman has risen the ranks without compromising on her strong creative vision (including the occasional pube joke). She became a “featured player” in the American skit show in October 2021, meaning she wasn’t part of the Little Leaguers anymore and was allowed to feature in skits including celebrities. She quickly advanced to “repertory player” in 2023, which made Sarah a regular part of the star-studded cast and a lead member of the ensemble.
A lot of Sarah’s earlier sketches hone in on the idea that her body is the basis of her comedy. She uses her whole body to talk, her hands, her eyes; there is a looseness to her movements that makes each punchline stronger. Every “gross” element is exacerbated by her charisma that seeps into every witty one-liner. I feel her energy through the screen as we chat - Sherman is generous as she shows me around her room, documenting her poster collection and trinkets on display. If I squint, we’re on television in full technicolour, and she’s ready to go any second. Sherman has the kind of inherent comedic timing that never stops, which is great for me, because I was left in stitches throughout our call.
Coat: Saks Potts | Gloves: Moschino | Shoes: Prada
It’s impossible for Sarah not to stand out; her wacky vintage suits and her soundboard-esque adlibs (“Hachi Machi! Awooga Awooga!”) are a welcome breath of fresh humour during the 90-minute program. While most performances on SNL focus on a formula of what works and a random mish-mash of what’s trending, Squirm’s personal brand of comedy is visually striking and memorable: There will be music and theatrics, something comically unusual on screen, coupled with Sarah’s earnest delivery, her voice ringing with hilarity. Take Meatballs, where Oscar Isaac and Charli XCX feature as singing ‘Meatballs of Flesh’ on Squirm’s quivering body or Battle of the Sexes - where Squirm gets her head lopped off with a tennis racket on live television, only to reveal it was a prosthetic all along. My personal favourite has to be Roller Coaster Accident, where Sherman and Michael B. Jordan are television presenters who have survived a particularly steep amusement park ride and have crazy hair-sprayed hair and permanently stupefied faces, completed by all their teeth and gums being on show. Classic Sarah Sherman shenanigans.
This summer, Sherman went on tour with her show, “Live in the Flesh” a cheeky nod to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) — a filmmaker she adores. She proudly showed me a signed image of Cronenberg, inscribed “To Sarah, Love David,” which she jokingly calls her “biggest brag.” She likens the surreal promo of her show to strip club signage.“It’s like a trigger warning,” she laughs. “The show - and the promo around it - is driving home the fact that it’s gross because so many people come to the show from SNL and aren’t expecting it.” Sarah Sherman, as she is credited on SNL, uses the pseudonym Sarah Squirm while performing on stage. “People at school called me Squirm because, well… [She laughs]. It’s in the name, isn’t it?”
Scarf: Dolce & Gabbana | Coat: Mary Katrantzou | Jacket: Comme Des Garcons | Bodysuit: David Koma | Boots: GCDs
Before she was running around as Chucky terrorising the likes of Jake Gyllenhall at SNL - Sarah grew up a contradiction. On one hand, she was studious, on the other, she was goofy and larger than life. “I wanted to read a lot and do well in school - which is so boring - but I was an overachiever.” The 31-year-old calls herself a “competitive clown” who spent her formative years doing stand-up at barbecue restaurants and basements, all culminating in a performance at her school gymnasium where a 16-year-old Sherman was pied in the face 100 times with whipped cream pies.
“It was fun to be an unexpected comedian at a noise show where people weren’t expecting comedy,”
This spirit of being a star student never left her, even though when she read John Water’s Shock Value and grimaced at his description of goodie two-shoe students, stating that if someone did well in school, they weren’t his friend and he didn’t want to talk to them. Sherman, who wore hoop skirts and excelled at sports and drama, was dealt her first bad hand when she got rejected from her college improv team. This didn’t stop her, with Sherman turning her rejection to redirection in college in Chicago - where she debuted her own comedy show, “Hell Trap Nightmare”, amidst noise shows in basements. Her friends, Hausu Mountain, were running an experimental lineup with Sherman going on between sets of electronic music and bands called “piss piss piss moan moan moan”. “It was fun to be an unexpected comedian at a noise show where people weren’t expecting comedy,” says Sherman, fondly reminiscing the crazed energy of those shows and the blend of comedy and music that punctuated her signature style of body horror.
Caftan: JW Anderson | Dress: Issey Miyake
Coat: Sies Marjan | Dress: Stella McCarthy | Stockings: Escada | Shoes: Casa Dei
“I was always a visual comedian,” Sherman adds, showing off her Pee Wee Herman doll collection. “That’s why all the body stuff comes into play - as a performer, it has every tool I need.” There is a charm to her comedy: the earnestness of someone bewildered by the beauty in the world juxtaposed next to lentil soup vomit.
“I grew up in Long Island where girls were thinking about surgery from a young age, and getting boob jobs for their birthdays so it’s no surprise I’ve always been into body horror. There's so much brutality in everyday life, I couldn’t help but be obsessed.”
Dress: Staud | Shoes: Gianvito Rossi | Bikini: Dolce & Gabbana
Her early comedic references were Ren and Stimpy and the Garbage Pail Kids - but more importantly, the environment around her: “I grew up in Long Island where girls were thinking about surgery from a young age, and getting boob jobs for their birthdays so it’s no surprise I’ve always been into body horror. There's so much brutality in everyday life, I couldn’t help but be obsessed.” Sherman details trips to dentists and her morbid fascination with comedy blended into horror. “I was a Jew with too many pubes, and all my attempts at comedy became localised to my body.”
When I ask her about the transition from nightly stand-up to live SNL performances, her enthusiasm is palpable. “Oh, it’s amazing,” she enthuses. “You don’t have to wait to find out if the joke is good. You just go and do it because of the quick turnaround.” When Sherman first started, she felt a little out of sorts, assuming that success on live television lay in making a “character”. Due to her background, Sherman had little experience being anyone but herself, which Weekend Update host Colin Jost noticed. “I wasn’t really in my groove that first season,” she recounts. “And then Colin Jost asked me to come on Weekend Updates as myself, and I was surprised - I didn’t know it was allowed.” So began her SNL takeover. Her strategy to nail the Weekend Updates set lay in making fun of Jost instead of making fun of the audience members, which is what usually goes down during her stand-up shows. And it was a hit- with their repartee being a highlight of every show. Viewers welcomed Sherman’s brand of chaos to the fairly straightforward Weekend Updates segment, with her outlandish jokes branding Jost as a “controlling freak” while he laughs good-naturedly.
“Live TV is like a tightrope - it’s so easily to fail, and I have failed, but working with everyone has been the highlight of my career so far.”
“I would just send him the script and be like, ‘Is it okay if I call you a paedophile?’” she laughs. “And he’d say, ‘Yes! That’s great!’” This playful dynamic boosted her confidence and paved the way for her to explore more characters, like C.J. Rositano, Colin’s long-lost son. She even debuted her own version of Weekend Update titled “Sarah News,” where she dons a vintage suit and delivers news forecasts her way, complete with jokes about her “pussy flooding the chair from watching too much Columbo.” What began as a “problem-solving equation” evolved into a collaborative effort, with Sherman working with her colleagues to refine her body-horror comedy: “Live TV is like a tightrope - it’s so easily to fail, and I have failed, but working with everyone has been the highlight of my career so far.”
Sherman found multiple creative epiphanies with long-time collaborator Louie Zakarian - the Head of Makeup at SNL and the SFX artist for this Polyester cover. Sarah’s signature skits often require a big punchline by way of a body component, most notably the gigantic googly eyes in her skit Eyes. The skit is fairly simple. A woman (Sarah Sherman) becomes upset when her coworkers don’t mention the drastic change in her appearance (she’s replaced her eyes with googly eyes). The top comment on the YouTube video sings Sarah’s praises for memorising the entire skit since there’s no way she could’ve read the cue cards with her prosthetic…
Except the skit had jokes that changed until the very last minute, so there was no way Sherman could have memorised her lines. The reality is far more complicated, with Louie and her troubleshooting the eyes during dress rehearsal to overcome multiple complications. “The black pupil of the eye was constantly in motion - so I could only see when both holes were aligned,” explains Sherman while I picture the scene and try to remain composed. “So Louie made a flesh goggle that went over my face, and he taped my eyelids so they were open, but then we realised the goggles would fog up because of my face sweat, so he had to spray them with defogging spray,” she recounts. You never see any of this trial-and-error when they go live on SNL - there is no room for mistakes. Sarah lives for this collaboration and her gratitude for finally having high-end prosthetics to make her jokes hit home. She’s gone from using lentil soup for vomit and making zits from bubble wrap to a prosthetic head that looks just like her.
“Ayo [Edebiri] sent me a picture of my head the other day when she was at the SNL makeup lab,” brings up Sarah when I ask her about the infamous head. “Most of the celebrities hosting need to get their faces scanned in case we need to make prosthetics of their faces,” she continues. Sarah’s head has been in any sketch they can. It was recently featured in the Ariana Grande episode chilling in the fridge during My Best Friend's House, and the writers have taken a delightfully macabre approach by beheading Sherman seemingly just for the fun of it. Sarah’s audience has excitedly taken this Easter Egg in their strides, with the “severed head count” currently standing at a strong 3. Comments like “They just don’t want your head attached to your body on this show” and “Funniest segment of this episode” litter Sherman’s comment section. It’s clear - the people love a body horror gag, even if it is desensitised for live television.
I wonder what her style of comedy would look like in a couple of years, considering how her popularity coincides with a horror renaissance in real-time. Films like The Substance have been released to widespread acclaim, Love Lies Bleeding has made it into the queer body horror hall of fame, and Weird Girls are having their resurgence on TikTok. It seems like people are finally giving Gross Girls their flowers- so what does Sarah Sherman want from the world? “Hopefully, in the next few years, I'll be able to do a bunch of crazy stuff on SNL, make a bunch of crazy movies, make a crazy stand-up special, and as long as I have a small group of crazy little bisexual teenagers who come to my show and bringing me eyeball gifts, we good.”
There have been periods of time when SNL was branded as unfunny, especially during experimental periods like when Adam Sandler joined the show. “Adam Sandler is life,” Sherman remarks when I ask her about it. Sherman was also featured in Adam Sandler’s film You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, where she played a young, overzealous rabbi who sings passages from the Torah. She recently watched Sandler’s comedy special on Netflix, Love You, and was moved by his tribute to comedy towards the end. “I was sobbing by the end of it because he’s talking about teenagers feeling sad in their rooms, so they put on their favourite comedies, and it makes them feel better - and that’s the essence of comedy to me.” I’m curious about her thoughts on Sandler on SNL, knowing there were mixed opinions during his run on the show.
“That’s the thing - everyone thought he was annoying on the show, but then he made a million movies, and they did so well that mainstream culture shifted towards him,” defends Sarah. That’s what she loves about SNL - that it can make seemingly stupid songs and skits so popular that they define what is mainstream and popular. “Because of SNL, I don’t have to tour alone, and I can write jokes with my friends and make people laugh, and that’s the best part of the job.”
