Sarah Squirm is ready to gross you the fuck out. The New York-based comedian (and alter ego of Saturday Night Live star Sarah Sherman) is coming to HBO with her special Live + In The Flesh, and never before has stand-up comedy been quite as gory as this. She’s making jokes about her genitalia, calling audience members perverts, and comes out to a set literally made of blood and guts — okay, maybe not actual blood and guts, but it’s the thought that counts.
While she’s had plenty of roles on TV — including one in the Chucky series — Live + In The Flesh is Sherman’s first stand-up comedy special, and she’s really gone all out for it. In celebration of her body horror magnus opus hitting HBO and HBO Max this Friday, December 12, we sat down with the SNL star to discuss the special and its influences, ranging in sophistication from Oingo Boingo and David Cronenberg to piss jokes and Pink Flamingos.
It’s clear from the off that she and I are on the same wavelength about her hour-long special as soon as I sit down with her over Zoom, where I can catch a glimpse in her gorgeously decorated, whimsical apartment — at one point I likened the show to Killer Klowns From Outer Space, not realizing she was already wearing a t-shirt featuring the candy-colored killers.
“That [film] was a huge influence on it,” she says. “The pinks and the reds in Killer Klowns, like when the bloody red face comes out of the cotton candy? That is my inspiration for everything.”
She showed me exactly how she transferred that inspiration to reality, in the form of drawings she handed off to her designers, many of whom worked with her on SNL. The massive intestines and eyeballs and various sundry body parts are all visible in her original sketches, which were then enhanced by unique practical set pieces and decorations:
Even though SNL is TV, it is live theater…and their big thing was like, “we want to see your hand in the work.” My references are like,… if my drawings are four dimensional, they would just look like an amusement park. Actually, we used old amusement park carnival lights on the set. You don't see them a lot, but they're there. So that's very Killer Klowns, too.
And the floor, I actually stole from Forbidden Zone, and I actually wonder if there's, like, legal ramifications for that. And when you go into the forbidden zone, it's like a sex, hedonist, rape zone. And the floor, you know that you're in the Forbidden Zone because the floor is this checkerboard dice thing, which is very, like Black Lodge too, but I just loved it so much that I kind of stole it.
Sherman’s very open about borrowing pieces from the things she loves to make Live + In the Flesh as bombastic and unhinged as she possibly can. “I’m like a bad Rodney Dangerfield sometimes,” she says, “This is everything I love. Like, it almost feels like a scrapbook of everything I've worked on in the past ten years, and then also, just everything I love. Like, my outfit’s very Paula Poundstone, and there's actually a Cabbage Patch Kid clown who has these pants, and I just like, basically stole the pants.”
She also sent letters to her own hero to get them involved in the show — one to Rob Zombie, whose music she walks out to, and one to John Waters, who she convinced to play a stage manager who summons her from a pile of bones and guts to her “human” (is she really human?) form. “It’s like, the brag of the century,” she says — and I believe it.
But it’s not just the pieces she’s nicked from other that help to bring her disgusting vision to life — Sherman also uses plenty of video projections and practical effects to push her comedy to the very edge, bringing to mind films like Videodrome and, as I put it, the Bog of Eternal Stench from Labyrinth. (“I didn’t even think about that,” she laughed when I said it. “Yeah, it does.”) And it’s made even grosser by the fact it was all made, as Sherman puts it, “in a garage in LA with no money”:
I've been touring with this show for a long time, and so a lot of the videos, all the blood special effects, that's all stuff that I did myself with, like, actual junk and wax and crap, but that's why it looks bad. But I kept it. I didn't remake the videos because I like the cartoonish, arts and crafts quality of it. I wanted to retain it, [but then] I redid some of its once I started working at SNL and I had a little money.
I paid my friend Izzy Galindo. He does a lot of awesome prosthetics… and then he made these, like bat wing lips. And that was the first time we had met, too. I was like, “Hey, I love your work. Do you mind gluing labia on me?” And he, of course, did it.
According to her, despite the insanity of doing a running gag about having disgusting looking genitals, her unique brand of gross-out body horror humor is actually what got her hired at SNL, something that surprised me to hear given how different the special is from what I’d see of her on TV. And she credits it with giving her the skills she needed to write a well-rounded special, even though she jokes that her friends said she’d “probably only last a season and then get fired.”
“It’s made me more well rounded,” she tells me, “But at the same time, I've been able to, like, sneak a couple of things on that are my vibe, like, “Oh, I'm covered in meatballs made of human meat!” or whatever. But it has become a thing of, like, when I clock into work at SNL, I'm very well behaved, and I'm Sarah Sherman. And then anytime Sarah Squirm comes out, it becomes like, I'm more unleashed when I'm doing my own work.”
And unleashed she is. Live + In The Flesh is a weirdly evocative special, at least for a fellow woman who’s lived her life with a body that doesn’t want to work properly. (Shoutout to chronic illness!) And to Sherman, much of her comedy that’s been labeled as body horror comes from that exact same space, of self-deprecation to deal with the realities of living in a female body:
I've been doing comedy for like, 100 years, and oftentimes stand ups…you're a comedian because there's like a giant black hole in inside of you where, like, a normal center of gravity is supposed to be.I'm like, a classic Jewish, self deprecating stand up and so it all started with talking about, like, “I have a fucking mustache,” all this stuff. So it's like, my version of a quote- unquote ‘body horror’ is just like, self deprecating, Jewish female trouble. That’s just the stuff that's the most exciting to me, because that's also the stuff that there's like, real, I don't want to say trauma, [but] like, girl shit, you know, that sucks.
Sarah Squirm: Live + In The Flesh premieres on HBO on December 12 at 9 PM ET, and will be available to stream on HBO Max the same day.
