Sarah Sherman Is Having Fun Faking It

Three minutes into Consequence’s conversation with Sarah Sherman, we’re talking about fake pubes. It’s a story she’s telling about what she’s learned about doing live comedy — and what she’s learned about faking it on stage.

“I’m not proud of the fact that one time in Chicago, I had a bucket full of hundreds of live worms that perished. But I did that. I did it and I regret it,” she says. “I think that’s why I love practical effects and props and stuff — it’s been an adventure on how not everything has to be real. Tommy Brennan, my coworker at SNL, we came up doing comedy in Chicago together. He was like, ‘Remember when you used to do a joke where you had your real pubes on stage in a bag?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, they don’t have to be real. They could be fake.’”

In her new HBO comedy special, Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh, you see a lot of Sherman’s fake pubes, exaggerated for comedic effect — just one of the hour’s many delightful touches. It’s a deranged, high-energy experience, featuring music by fire toolz, animation, props, plenty of gross-out humor, all culminating in a guided meditation that might also be described as a descent into madness.

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Part of her journey in developing the special was, as mentioned, figuring out what elements would be funnier or more engaging if they were faked. As one example, she mentions her original idea to film the piece at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. In her words, “Obviously I have to do my standup special as a reanimated corpse in a cemetery. That is the only thing that makes sense.”

Then, once they started talking about the logistics of actually filming it, the Brooklyn venue The Bell House, where Sherman had already performed “millions of times,” made more sense. “Everyone was like, we can make a fake cemetery. You don’t actually have to do the comedy special at the cemetery. And it’s like, right. It can’t be a real cemetery if an eyeball crawls out from behind a mound of dirt and sucks up a bunch of tinier eyeballs.”

That and other wonderful visuals were created by Sherman’s collaborators, with Sherman’s friend Erma Fiend working on the opening graveyard animation and a sequence she describes as the “Hellraiser formulation.” Sherman says she’s “mourning” the end of the animation process, because she enjoyed it so much, describing it as “people sending each other drawings back and forth that out of context are insane.”

Her email exchanges with stop-motion animator Rich Zim (Pee-wee’s Playhouse, The Nightmare Before Christmas) included questions like “Should this part of the tunnel be maggots and decomposing flesh? Or should this be the neon tentacle intestines?” Says Sherman, “That felt like Christmas every day. The fact that it’s over is awful.”

As you might guess from the previous paragraphs, there’s a very Halloween-y vibe to Live + In the Flesh, and Sherman says that there were conversations with HBO about releasing it in October. “The one problem is that everything takes a long time to do. And I do like that it’s not coming out on Halloween, because this is what I’m like all the time. I’m not really Halloween-y. I’m less like ghouls and goblins and more like rotting flesh, if that makes sense.”

Amplifying that vibe is a cameo from famed director and oddball icon John Waters, who Sherman hadn’t known prior to filming, but brought on board with a handwritten letter. “I drew a pile of bones and guts and goo and I said, ‘This is going to be your scene partner. I love you. Here’s my number.’ And then one day I was leaving therapy, feeling miserable, and I walked by this coffee shop and bought a full baguette. I just was walking down the street, eating bread, and I got a call from an unknown Baltimore area code number. And it’s like, ‘Hey, it’s John Waters. See you on set.’”

“Not to brag,” she adds, but Waters called her a “Gore Gore Girl,” referencing the 1972 Herschell Gordon Lewis horror-comedy film. “It’s the highest compliment you can give.”

Like many comedy specials, the credits of Live + In the Flesh include a “special thanks” section, including folks like Adam Sandler, who Sherman’s toured with frequently, and David Spade. Curiosity drives me to ask about the latter’s inclusion, and she explains that after one of her shows with Sandler, Spade came up to her with a punch-up for one of her jokes. His pitch: “There’s so much old meat in my underwear, I gotta keep a silica packet in there to keep it from going bad.”

“Thank you, David. Thank you,” she adds, because when a comedian like Spade gives you a punch-up like that, “it’s a literal Christmas gift. Going on tour with Sandler is the best, because they’re all friends, and they’re all punching each other’s jokes up. It’s really sweet.”

Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh (HBO)

In the special, Sherman leans hard on sound effects and needle drops — triggered by her on-stage pedalboard — with composer Jonathan Wolff’s famous theme for Seinfeld serving as a repeated punchline. It was a cue she wasn’t expecting them to be able to play in the filmed version, due to music rights, but then the producer was surprisingly able to lock it down. However, she wasn’t able to use Mark Snow’s theme for The X-Files, “but I made it work with a different sci-fi theme song.”

Sherman credits her recent love for the pedalboard to Daniel Lopatin, otherwise known as Oneohtrix Point Never. “I was operating the PowerPoint videos and stuff myself on stage, and he was like, ‘You need a pedalboard.’ And I was like, ‘No, don’t turn me into a noise bro. I can’t handle that.’ And he was like, ‘Well, you’re doing it. I just have this vision of you stomping on big pedals during the show.’”

Lopatin and producer Nathan Salon set up the board to create a “wet, echo-y” reverb that was subtle enough for the audience to understand what she was saying. This ended up saving her vocally, because prior to then she’d been literally screaming during a certain portion of the show.

“I took screaming lessons from Melissa Cross, who literally taught Chris Cornell how to scream, but I just kept losing my voice. And so Dan and Nathan helped me with these screamy distortion effects on the pedalboard, so that I could scream without losing my voice every night on tour. And then they helped me program all the pedals to have the Seinfeld drop and the X-Files thing, and it has this whammy pedal that distorts my voice… And I can proudly say now that, unfortunately, I am now a noise bro.”

Because Sherman admits that Lopatin was right — she loves stomping on the board. “It’s one of the centerpieces of the special itself, all these buttons that I’m stomping on, they become like an energetic portal on the stage. It just opened up a world of possibilities that I didn’t know was possible. Dan, you’ve changed my life in many ways.”

Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh (HBO)

Because the pedalboard was introduced after Sherman had already written the core material of the special, she’s looking forward to writing future material with this new toolkit at her disposal. “I can start reverse engineering jokes and starting with vocal effects, as opposed to retrofitting some things after the fact.”

Sherman’s emphasis on these multimedia effects, she says, comes from her belief that “I’m not the best joke writer. I’m not going to sit down and write a hundred jokes, and you can just watch an hour of my jokes. I have to lilypad around from medium to medium to keep myself entertained and keep the ideas moving. So anywhere to fuck around and come up with the new ideas, whether it’s fucking around with the pedals or getting back into more video stuff and making weird effects — that’s where all the ideas come from. It’s just messing around with crap.”

Sherman of course has a day job, as a Saturday Night Live cast member since 2021. Working on both Live + In the Flesh as well as the weekly sketch show, she says, have “really informed each other in a lot of ways. I was touring with this show, just a screaming crazy ‘Fuck you!’ in like Phoenix, Arizona. And then I go back to SNL and it’s like, ‘Oh right, I have to write jokes and you need to give people points of access. If you’re going to hold people hostage for an hour and a half, you give them texture and variation and different kinds of energy.”

As she continues, “SNL has helped me be a more well-rounded performer, and it forced me to actually write jokes with punchlines. I can bring a lot of that with me when I’m off the clock — and I’m Sarah Unleashed.”

Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh premieres December 12th on HBO, streaming on HBO Max.