While watching Sarah Sherman’s new HBO stand-up special, Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh (2025), I kept imagining a younger version of myself stumbling across it late at night after the rest of the house had gone to sleep, checking over my shoulder and thinking, “Can I be caught watching this?” While many may have been introduced to the New York-born comedian via Saturday Night Live (where she’s often appearing in normal-person-drag), Sherman’s special plunges the viewer into the carnivalesque chaos of her live show, and layers an array of stop-motion claymation and video art on top of it. By the end of the hour, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve watched a punk rock comedy show or an experimental film. A memorable image of Sherman screaming while underwater during a guided meditation from Hell evokes both David Lynch and Cindy Sherman. Not to mention, the special is christened by a cameo from the “Pope of Trash” himself, John Waters, who introduces the viewer to the bloody, goopy, glittery viscera of Sherman’s corpse as she gets ready to go onstage.
The Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is almost unrecognizable in the special, transformed into what can only be described as an intestinal circus, complete with giant veiny papier-mâché eyeballs looming over the live audience. Sherman, meanwhile, is like a clown emceeing a show at the Grand Guignol—does she want you to laugh, vomit, or both? Her rapid joke delivery, punctuated one moment by background videos of a hangnail ripping off and the next by the iconic Seinfeld bass line is so disjointed it leaves no room to get comfortable, and thus prevents you from looking away until the live audience is sprayed with blood. It’s like the climax of a Gwar concert inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
Live + In the Flesh premiered during a difficult moment for the stand-up special genre, as comedians struggle to mark their own territory within the never-ending content churn. Every major streaming platform is currently crowded with hastily-produced one-hour shows featuring each and every viral comic. To say that Sherman’s film feels out of step with the mainstream stand-up landscape would be an understatement, as her major accomplishment is having created a visual and aural cacophony that resists the algorithm.
I spoke with Sherman about the influence film has had on her work, the timeless appeal of DIY practical effects, and developing a stand-up special that feels unique and atemporal in the era of digital slop.
Stephanie Monohan: I saw you live a couple years back and, if I remember correctly, a lot of the content from that show carried over into the filmed special. Were you aware that this was something you wanted to exist on its own, as an independent video artifact?
Sarah Sherman: Because of the internet, the comedy economy right now really centers around “clip culture,” where in order to sell tickets you have to post as many clips online as humanly possible, or you have to churn out a lot of specials in order to sell any tickets at all. It’s just the reality of how comedians make a living and it's relatively recent. Norm Macdonald, for instance, only had one comedy special. I had been putting off doing a special for a long time because I was having so much fun doing the live show. I was really nervous about how to translate the energy from the live performance into something that is archive. I’m also just a neurotic person, so I felt it had to be perfect.
Waiting so long was worth it because I ended up assembling this amazing group of people who were able to help me make it what it was supposed to be. In making it a movie and working with a DP [Christopher Messina], we could figure out how to take a crazy moment where I’m screaming at the audience and translate it into something that pulls that live feeling out. There are these little insert shots that we shot before the show tapings where the DP is filming me in close-up during a joke, where all of a sudden my head turns to look at the camera while I’m snorting cocaine. We wanted these Ren & Stimpy sort of close-ups in there.
SM: It makes sense because those Ren & Stimpy close-ups are so effectively disgusting because they’re intricately drawn pieces of art.
SS: They’re oil paintings! Basically, my whole life has been stolen from that. There's literally so much Looney Tunes logic in the special—all of a sudden my eyes bug out of my head. Even more broadly, there’s a lot of fleshy innards and organs and kind of realistic viscera, but then really flat cartoon elements.
SM: Your collaborators on the special are also deep in the film world. You basically have the whole Marty Supreme/If I Had Legs I’d Kick You cohort.
SS: They had literally just finished cutting Marty Supreme [2025] and they went straight from Marty into my project. I think I was being so precious over my material because it’s everything I’ve been working on for the past 10 years, but I was able to surrender to these people because they’re geniuses. Ronnie Bronstein and Jack Bensinger, my best friend who opened for the whole tour, helped me shape the hour a lot and I was able to learn a lot from them.
Even though Ronnie makes these brutal, realistic, emotionally tortured movies, his favorite stuff to ingest is the same cartoon gross-out stuff that I like. His favorite thing to do is buy me boxes of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. And the guy who made the demented clown music in the beginning, Paul Grimstad—he was the radio guy in One Battle After Another [2025]. It’s funny how the special is connected to these 2025 zeitgeisty things that people don’t even know about.
SM: How did you approach the special at the start and how did you get HBO on board with what you wanted to do?
SS: When I finally landed on doing a comedy special and committing it to tape, I asked Cody Critcheloe, who I had been a huge fan of. He was in this band Ssion and made all of his own music videos in Kansas City and has a very DIY aesthetic. I called him up out of the blue and just asked him if he wanted to do a comedy special. We shopped it around for years and pitched it to everyone as an uncompromising vision that cost money and was a little different from a lot of other comedy specials. I can’t believe HBO was so down. I get kind of emotional about it because I just think it’s so rare and the algorithm has such a stranglehold on what people think they’re allowed to put money into.
SM: While I was watching the show, it reminded me of when I’d stumble upon movies or artists as a kid because I’d be staying up late. When you’re maybe slightly too young, so it just blows your mind in a really special, formative way. I don't know if we’re totally past this point in the age of brainrot Skibidi Toilet content, but I could easily see this being a gateway drug for teens that introduces them to a new world of visual culture, references, and possibilities in comedy.
SS: I didn’t even realize I was doing that because I’m just what all of my influences are. My diet is literally what I grew up obsessed with. I talked about making the special exhaustively in therapy and my therapist was like, “Are you making this for your inner child?” I didn’t realize it, but that’s one billion percent who this special is for. If there is a teenager out there who sees it like a hair too young, it makes me emotional to think about.
When you’re on SNL, the first thing you learn is to not read the Internet. Everybody hates you and hates SNL. But with this I took the opportunity to just go and read everything. People who hate it still write things like, “I can’t believe what I just saw, half star, sucks.” People are so desensitized to seeing anything, so the fact that we were able to make something that people were actively having responses to in this slop world, I could never ask for anything better.
SM: I consider myself pretty desensitized, at least to gore and gross-out content that I know is not real, and even I had to take a break from the burrito I was eating just listening to you describe hemorrhoids in detail—no visuals involved!
SS: Thank you! It’s usually the hangnail that gets people, which makes me laugh because my friend Izzi Galindo did all the fancy practical effects but I did all the shitty ones in my garage when I was living in LA with no money. The hangnail is just wax that I did by myself. The fact that people are grossed out by that brings me joy. But, hearing that the mere description made you put food down makes me so happy. Mission accomplished.
SM: I think that lower budget DIY practical effects are sometimes even more effective than professional ones—it scratches your brain in a different way. Maybe it takes something obviously tactile to reach people in an over-algorithmitized world right now and truly gross them out.
SS: It’s very uncanny valley-esque.
SM: How did you link up with David Daniels?
SS: I’ve been such a fan of his and he does workshops where he teaches the strata-cut animation technique, but because of the SNL schedule I’ve never been able to do it. This whole process has just been me being a fan of people and then reaching out to them and asking them, “Do you want to do this?” He blows my mind. I know how it works, but I don’t totally grasp it, because it’s this 10-dimensional thinking that is mind-bending. I don’t want to say it's a dying art form because he basically invented it and is the only person who does it, but there is no AI in this thing. In fact, it’s not only the opposite of AI, it's so hand-made and human-brained that I don’t think AI could ever conceive of it.
SM: Did you give him any direction at all or did you just let him generally know what you were looking for and let him cook?
SS: I made a really colorful storyboard and script, so everyone knew the exact vibe. But then it was my strong suggestion to them to fuck around and do whatever they wanted to do. Everyone who worked on this is such a genius that it would’ve been a shame to be didactic about anything. I basically told David, “Okay, in this final note I’m screaming and I want my head to flay and turn into crazy distorted psychedelic eyeball torture, and then end with a smear that transitions us back to the live show.” He did the opening titles for Freaked [1993], which is my favorite movie ever and he uses smears as transitions. He builds these highly intricate works of art and then destroys them in this smear that turns into another thing. That total destruction and entropy just felt really perfect for the end of the special because it has such a high-pitched climax. I had no idea he was going to go off and do everything he did. It was totally amazing. The jackhammering clit at the end is from a joke that we actually cut about jackhammering my clit into a pink paste and then he actually animated it.
SS: What sort of jokes or scenes did you end up cutting?
SS: Anything that felt very timely, like an RFK joke, an abortion joke. When we were editing we realized that this could be the most timeless special ever if we wanted. You start in a crypt and the stage looks like it's in outer space in a clown’s intestine—no one should know where we are in time and space. So any ordinary jokes that are commonplace in the comedy lexicon or felt timely got cut. It’s just this assault on the senses that can exist at any point in time.
SM: That intersects nicely with the practical effects, because it feels like we’re at a point when audiences are most nostalgic for the practical effects they saw growing up and newer filmmakers are gravitating to them more and more. When watching older movies, even if the practical effects aren't the most convincing, it still feels like CGI dates them even more.
SS: I only recently saw Cats [2019] and it's crazy! It is so firmly in 2019 in a way that’s shocking. The CGI dates things to a very specific year, and not even a fun year. I’m certainly nostalgic for a time when things didn't suck. I have so many fond memories of all the stuff that was made during the time when David Daniels and Rich Zim and all these animators were working on TV.
SM: The term “body horror” is used a lot in relation to your work and I want to know how you feel about it? The special definitely channels some body horror and paranoia, but the grossness is so gleeful that it feels celebratory about how disgusting and weird our bodies are.
SS: It’s funny, I guess that technically it is body horror and my favorite stuff is in the genre of body horror. David Cronenberg makes my favorite movies ever. Brain Damage [1988]. Dead Alive [1992]. These are all my favorite movies. But I don’t want people to think for a second that the ultimate goal isn’t comedy. I’m not taking myself too seriously. I worry when people see the “body horror” tag they think, “She’s taking herself so seriously.” I’m just a comedian. I happen to have a point of view that is gross and it’s also what all my jokes are about, but it’s also what Garbage Pail Kids are. It’s what Ren & Stimpy is. That’s all body horror as well.
SM: I know Cronenberg and John Waters are some pretty obvious influences. Are there any other filmmakers or movies that have shaped your aesthetic and approach, perhaps not in ways that are super overt?
SS: Well, there’s so many literal influences. You know, I stole the artist who made the thing I loved the most from Freaked. I literally stole the dice floor from Forbidden Zone [1980]. Obviously Pee-wee’s Christmas special. I really love Clifford [1994]. Martin Short’s character is the ultimate pest. He’s a demonic nuisance and I feel like that’s what I try to channel. I stole the butthole portals from Lifeforce [1985], the Tobe Hooper movie. Movies are life.
In terms of the stand-up specials I watched in preparation, there was a lot of Phyllis Diller—you could actually say she does body horror comedy! And The Diceman Cometh [1989], the Andrew Dice Clay special with his crazy Vegas glitzy set and giant sparkly dice. Say what we will about him, he’s iconic.
SM: Is there anything that you’ve seen in the past year that you loved?
SS: I loved Fuck My Son! [2025], the Todd Rohal movie. It was a Johnny Ryan comic that they turned into a movie with a ton of crazy practical effects, and they’re only showing it in theaters. I don’t think it's doing a digital or physical release. It’s everything I want. I want to go to a midnight movie with a bunch of freaks and watch an X-rated movie that I can only describe as “horror diaper porn.”
SM: “Horror diaper porn” is the new Letterboxd list I’m most looking forward to.
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