However, once Sherman began his set, bursting onto stage with his middle finger raised and immediately insulting the audience (“Shut up! Fuck you!”), I realized I was in for a more extreme experience than I had initially imagined. Dressed in a colorful polka dot shirt, red tie, and voluminous rainbow pants, with her hair cut in a tousled mullet, the thirty-two-year-old Sherman delivered a performance almost entirely devoted to an abrasive discussion of the abjection of the human body—primarily her own. She complained at length, with disgusting sound effects and extremely close to the microphone, about her oversized sportswear being “sucked” into her “hole”; she waxed poetic about her vaginal discharge and excessive sweating, citing the “wasabi stains” on the armpits of her T-shirt and underwear that “look like [her] the cat sneezed in it. She spoke at length about urine and feces, noting that, for her, “pissing and shitting is not a binary, it’s a fucking spectrum.” . . my piss is so thick and my shit is so watery, no matter what I do in the bathroom, honey, I’m going to number 1.5, hey! (“What kind of comedy show were you thinking you’d see tonight?” she asked, as the audience groaned and laughed.) The body hair was also worthy of a monologue: Her pubic stubble is so thick, she said, that it could make a “fucking wicker basket,” and her nipple hair is “so long I could clip my breasts together to get incredible cleavage.”
Towards the end of the show, Sherman showed a PowerPoint video combining real footage and plasticine, in which she is seen naked: her enormous bush, her kudzu-like armpit hair, her widely spread vulva, and her labia, made of prosthetics, hanging almost to her feet. “I can’t go to the beach, my lips are so long and distended and disgusting, like they’re falling between my knees like the pendulum of a grandfather clock,” she began. His lips, she said, looked like a turkey wattle, an open Reuben sandwich, or the jowls of an old English mastiff, “and just as slobbery too!” She riffed on and on, and the gruesome images on the screen kept coming: Sherman delicately nibbling those freaky labia before tucking them into a tiny pair of bikini bottoms, or layering deli meat over her vaginal opening and throwing a jar of thousand island dressing in for good measure (“my vibrator is a pickle spear and a towel!”), or opening her legs wide to reveal a mouth that, grinning creepily, squirted period blood in large chunks. between his teeth. “Look at the screen!” Sherman shouted to audience members, many of whom screamed in horrified joy. Spicing his jokes with the macho comedian’s “You know what I mean”? and “Are you kidding me?” while delivering totally confronting and utterly unrelenting female body horror, she was like a bizarre mix of Rodney Dangerfield and Hannah Wilke.
After checking in, I went to say hello to Sherman in her dressing room, where she sat huddled on a couch next to her longtime boyfriend, Dan Sloan, a sweet-faced academic. Up close, she was fine and very pretty. She had removed her polka dot clown top and remained in a white undershirt, and with her glittery eyeshadow and hair swept across her face, she suddenly looked a lot like a nice, upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Long Island, which is, in a sense, exactly what she is. Getting up from the couch, she greeted me with a hug, only to back away almost immediately. “I’m so sorry, am I really sweaty?” » she asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
It was not a foregone conclusion that Sarah Sherman would become Sarah Squirm. She grew up in Great Neck, just behind the location of the Peter Luger Steak House restaurant on Long Island. His father owns a children’s clothing company and takes the LIRR to his office in the garment district every day; his mother is a retired teacher; his younger brother, who now lives in the city, works in market research. She’s still very close to them all, although, as she notes, her parents are “sexy and I’m kind of reactionary towards them.” As a teenager, she was a good student and excelled at sports, running and working summers as a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the local pool. She wasn’t exactly one of the popular kids, but she was well-liked. “I was funny, and when you’re funny you can be very socially mobile,” she told me. One year, the quarterback even asked her out, but she wasn’t interested. What she was what interested him, from a very young age, was being an actor.
Her earliest influences as a child came from network television. She was obsessed with sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “The Nanny,” mainstream shows full of Jewish tri-state humor. (In her set, she still uses the slap-bass tone of the “Seinfeld” theme to punctuate some of her punchlines.) Later, while watching cable, she became interested in sharp-tongued comedians like Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin; she first discovered it on E!’s “Fashion Police.” and the second on the Bravo reality show “My Life on the D-List.” Sherman began going into town with friends to watch stand-up comedy (“We’d say, ‘Louis CK is stopping by the Creek and the Cave!'”) and joined the improv club at Great Neck South High School, putting on comedy shows in the basement of the local library, which housed a youth community center called Levels. For many, that would have meant social suicide (“If you went to Levels, you had a taint on you,” Ronald Bronstein, a fellow Great Neck native who produced Sherman’s special and was instrumental in making it, told me.) Sherman didn’t hesitate to hang out with the freaks, however. “I thought Levels was cool because everyone was a crazy fucking loser,” she said. His high school acting cohort also gave him the nickname “Squirm”: “They called me ‘Squirmin’ Sherman’ because I was kind of skinny and disgusting.”
