Sarah "Squirm" Sherman Is the Renegade Body-Horror Comedian 'SNL' Needs (2024)

Body-horror. It’s not a word often associated with a show as conventional as Saturday Night Live. Yet, this is the exact comedic sensibility surrealist comedian Sarah Sherman brought to SNL when she joined the show in its 47th season. Since then, Sherman has quickly become one of the standout voices on the show. This was during a time when SNL was in need of a revamp. When Sherman debuted in Season 47, her presence was immediately made known through her exaggerated performances, in-your-face sense of humor, and cornering a market of absurdity on the show. Before discussing Sherman’s impact on the show, it’s worth talking about how she got there to begin with.

Before joining SNL, Sherman went by the comedy alias Sarah Squirm. It's an accurate name for a comedian whose work makes you shift in your seat in disgust just as much as it makes your belly hurt from laughing. It's a level of absurdity and gross-out that's like Pink Flamingos by way of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly something to behold. If comedy centered around popping pimples or homemade vaccines that make your face melt and eyes pop out isn't exactly your cup of tea, its unlikely that this era of Sherman's comedy will be for you. So the question remains: how does a sense of humor as aggressive and grotesque as Sherman's translate to a world-famous institution such as Saturday Night Live?

When Sherman joined the cast of SNL in 2021, her place in the show was made immediately apparent. During the sketch "School Board Meeting," Sherman has a quick appearance wearing a cowboy outfit decorated with cowskin and polka-dot patterned overalls plucked straight out of Pee-wee's Playhouse before being booted from the sketch for being off-topic.

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From the start, her role as an unconventional force of nature is made apparent, but it wasn't until the season's sixth episode (Jonathan Majors/Taylor Swift) that Sherman made her debut as a featured player. This was during a Weekend Update segment entitled "Sarah Sherman Roasts Colin Jost." This sketch is nowhere near as grotesque as Sherman's online videos or stand-up but the sheer personality on display throughout is contagiously funny. Her delivery is overstated, but it's her earnest expression of insanity against Jost's bewildered laughter that makes the pair play off each other so well. The sketch hinges on her unpredictability as a character, and what better way to introduce a wildcard such as Sarah Sherman than that?

Sherman certainly isn't the first unconventional comedian to be featured on SNL (i.e. Tim Robinson, Kyle Mooney, etc.). However, what makes her remarkable is her success in spite of that fact. Where actors like Robinson often felt they had to tone down their material for SNL, Sherman finds inventive alternative ways to channel her deranged sensibilities into the show. She can't put something as stomach-churning yet hilarious as "The Sarah Vaccine" on NBC. On the other hand, what she can do is put her strong and vibrant personality on full blast. It's this lack of compromise that makes her presence on the show so special. It may not be as horrifying as her "Squirm" era work, but one would be hard-pressed to find anything similar to Sherman's hilariously strange "Meatballs" sketch in the last 10 years of Saturday Night Live canon.

What makes Sherman's material work so well for a show like SNL is her attitude and how the live audience responds to it. She is constantly working at high capacity and this makes her such a consistent standout personality. Sherman has said she takes a lot of inspiration from former SNL alum, the late Norm MacDonald. In an interview with Bustle, Sherman stated, "I relate to him because he was never not himself... I'm trying really hard to play different characters, but when you do standup for so long, you're yourself all the time.” It's this pure devotion to standing out that makes her a memorable part of whatever sketch she's in.

As of May 2022, Sherman has completed her first full season at Saturday Night Live. Yet, as polarizing as she can be, it feels like the Squirm era of SNL is just beginning. Sherman's material constantly feels like it's totally fresh and unpredictable. Even if a punchline can be seen coming a mile away, it's how she delivers it that'll leave you a congealed ball of flesh laughing itself into oblivion. Sherman would have it no other way. The notion of "body-horror comedy" coming to SNL has even been able to bring a smile to the face of body horror maestro David Cronenberg. With other noted comedic voices of the show like Kate McKinnon and Kyle Mooney having now left the series, there's a void of absurdity to be filled. The old SNL is dead. Long live the new flesh.