The reason I do this podcast is that I love to have interesting conversations with brilliant idiosyncratic creative people, and this episode is a perfect encapsulation of that.
Sarah Sherman has been a breath of fresh air on Saturday Night Live since she joined the show as a cast member and writer in 2021, and she now has her first special on HBO: Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh.
It’s very much not your average comedy special, but rather Sherman’s thematic preoccupations and personal aesthetics turned up to 11. In practice, that means a collision of cutesy voices, gaudy colors, Jewish neurosis, body dysmorphia and grotesque body horror, with more than a hint of John Waters (who has a cameo) and David Cronenberg. There’s multimedia elements, effects pedals, a little crowd work. It’s chaotic, stomach-churning, often hysterically funny and frequently hide-your-face uncomfortable, sometimes at the same time.
I spoke to Sherman in her SNL dressing room a couple days after her HBO special came out, so she was focused a lot both on her day job and the Letterboxd reviews of Live + In the Flesh that she’d been obsessively reading.
Our conversation, though, was very wide-ranging. I asked her a bunch of questions from my patented Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That list, but she also said so many interesting things that I wasn’t able to ask follow-up questions about all of them, for example the fact that she took screaming lessons from the person who taught Chris Cornell how to "scream sing"!
However, the subjects we did dig into in our chat included: recurring nightmares, hypochondria, masochism, shit-talking people as a healthy form of expression, our thoughts on death, funerals and 12 step, how Ted Kaczynski was onto something …, SNL boss Lorne Michaels’ unfortunate habit of forcing his employees to be constantly sleep-deprived, and much, much more.
Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh is now streaming on HBO. Go watch it and then write something thoughtful about it on Letterboxd.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
