There are parts of Sarah Sherman’s new comedy special, Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh, that will feel intimately familiar to students of stand-up. As she cavorts onstage, the loose physicality of her alter ego Sarah Squirm calls to mind fellow Saturday Night Live alum Gilda Radner, and some of her best jokes are punctuated with Seinfeld riffs. In terms of her material, though, Sherman is absolutely doing her own thing, serving up tonally wild yet genuinely thoughtful bits about everything from mammograms to politics (“I’m a cool Jew. I believe in a free Palestine…. Of course I do, I’m Jewish and it’s free”).
Ahead of the special’s release on December 12, Vogue nabbed some time with Sherman in between SNL rehearsals to talk about successfully shooting her shot with John Waters and gender affirmation via a Mondo Guerra clown tie.
Vogue: Can you tell me a little bit about this stand-up special’s gross-out visuals and set design?
Sarah Sherman: I worked with this collective called Dots, who are so genius. Oh my fucking God, I love working with theater people, because everything was so intentional. They were like, “What if the door was a butthole?” And that was something I was really excited to do—just climb onstage out of a butthole for my first-ever comedy special. I sent them a drawing of a slime green door with an eyeball, and they were like, “Right, because the eyeball’s infected.” They made the handle on the door a little hand, like a sex toy for fisting, and they painted the nails on the hand.
Beautiful!
I know!
How did you get John Waters to appear in this, and what was it like working with him?
I mean, I was frozen in fear. I hope I acted cool. I hope I made a good impression. He’s so fun. I wrote him a letter and drew a picture of the pile of bones and goo that he’s interfacing with in the scene, and was like, “Will you be in my stand-up special? You’re in a crypt, and you’re talking to this.” And then the bones-and-guts drawing was there. I put my phone number in the letter, and a couple of days later, I got a call from an unknown number with a Baltimore area code. He was like, “Hey, it’s John Waters, I’ll see you on set.”
How did you balance writing this material and putting this special together with your SNL work?
I usually tour on my time off from the show, so spending the summer taping a special felt right. It was a very bloated hour, and then editing was the excruciating process of cutting out half an hour because the producers were like, “Leave them wanting more.” I’m such a maximalist that I’d never considered that. I like to say, “Overstay your welcome, and make people miserable.” So cutting out half an hour was hard.
Tell me everything about that pink mic. Did you get that made?
We wanted to do an eyeball microphone where the pink would be the guts and the ball of the microphone would be an eyeball, and then the stem of the microphone would be the viscera and roots, but I put the mic in my mouth so much that we were like, “Oh, we can’t put anything on top of this microphone.”
How would you describe the vibe of the outfit you wear to perform this special?
My costume designer, Ashley, who I work with at SNL, was working on the special, as was my makeup girl Rachel, who’s literally doing my face right now. Say hi to Rachel.
Hi, Rachel!
Rachel glued all the sequins to my face for the special, and my SNL hair girl Gina was there too, which felt really nice. Your hair, makeup, and costume people are the ones closest to your body, so it made me feel safe and taken care of. I drew a picture of the costume, sent it to Ashley, and the references were a Cabbage Patch doll from the ’80s in a clown outfit and Paula Poundstone. Ashley literally made it exactly, and then her friend Karen did all the rhinestones. Mondo Guerra did the foam tie, which was just a tie that I had. Even though I was like, It’s my first special, and I want to do a crazy costume, I’m so comfortable in that tie. The most gender affirmation I ever feel is when I’m in my foam clown tie by Mondo.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
