Once Sherman began her set, though, storming onstage with her middle fingers raised and immediately insulting the audience (“Shut up! Fuck you!”), I realized that I was in for a more extreme experience than I’d initially imagined. Wearing a colorful polka-dot shirt, a red tie, and voluminous rainbow pants, with her hair cut in a scraggly mullet, Sherman, who is thirty-two, delivered a performance that was almost entirely given over to an abrasive discussion of the abjectness of the human body—mostly her own. She complained at length, with repellent, extremely-close-to-the-mike slurping sound effects, about getting her oversized gym clothes “sucked into” her “hole”; she waxed poetic about her vaginal discharge and her excessive sweating, citing the “wasabi stains” on her T-shirt’s armpits and her underwear that “look like [her] pussy sneezed in it.” She spoke at length of urine and feces, noting that, for her, “pissing and shitting isn’t a binary, it’s a fucking spectrum . . . my piss is so thick and my shit is so runny, no matter what I’m doing in the bathroom, honey, I’m going to number 1.5, hey!” (“What kind of comedy show did you think you were seeing tonight?” she demanded, as the audience groaned and laughed.) Body hair, too, merited a soliloquy: her pubic thatch is so thick, she said, that it could make for a “wicker goddam basket,” and her nipple hair is “so long I could tie my tits together to get amazing cleavage.”
Toward the end of the show, Sherman projected a PowerPoint video combining real footage and claymation, in which she’s seen in the nude—her bush enormous, her armpit hair kudzu-like, her vulva spread wide, and her labia lips, made of prosthetics, dangling nearly to her feet. “I can’t go to the beach, my lips are so long and distended and disgusting, like knock around between my knees like the pendulum on a grandfather clock,” she began. Her labia, she said, were like a turkey’s wattle, or an open-faced Reuben sandwich, or the jowls of an old English mastiff, “and just as slobbery, too!” On and on she riffed, and the horrifying images onscreen kept coming: Sherman nibbling daintily at those freakish lips before wrestling them into a tiny pair of bikini bottoms, or layering deli meat on her vaginal opening and tossing a jar of thousand island dressing in there for good measure (“my vibrator is a pickle spear and a napkin!”), or opening her legs wide to reveal a mouth that, smiling spookily, spurted out chunky period blood from between its teeth. “Look at the screen!” Sherman yelled at the audience members, many of whom were squealing in horrified glee. Peppering her jokes with the macho standup comedian’s “D’you know what I mean?” and “You kidding me?” while delivering utterly confronting, utterly unremitting female body horror, she was like some bizarro blend of Rodney Dangerfield and Hannah Wilke.
After the taping, I went to say hi to Sherman in her dressing room, where she sat huddled on a couch next to her long-term boyfriend, Dan Sloan, a sweet-faced academic. Up close, she was slight and very pretty. She had taken off her polka-dot clown top and remained in a white undershirt, and with her glittery eye shadow and her hair swept off her face, she suddenly looked a lot like a nice upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Long Island, which is, in one sense, exactly what she is. Rising from the sofa, she greeted me with a hug, only to draw back almost immediately. “I’m so sorry—am I really sweaty?” she asked, seeming genuinely worried.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Sarah Sherman would end up becoming Sarah Squirm. She grew up in Great Neck, right behind the Long Island location of the Peter Luger Steak House restaurant. Her father owns a children’s-clothing company and takes the L.I.R.R. every day to his office in the garment district; her mother is a retired teacher; her younger brother, who now lives in the city, works in market research. She’s still very close to all of them, even though, as she notes, her parents are “hot, and I’m sort of reactionary to them.” As a teen, she was a good student and great at sports, running track and working summers as a lifeguard and swim teacher at the local pool. She wasn’t one of the popular kids, exactly, but she was well liked. “I was funny, and when you’re funny you can be really socially mobile,” she told me. She even got asked out by the quarterback one year, but she wasn’t interested. What she was interested in, from a young age, was being a comedian.
Her earliest influences as a kid came from network television. She was obsessed with sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “The Nanny”—mainstream shows prickly with tri-state Jewish humor. (In her set, she still uses the slap-bass twang of the “Seinfeld” theme to punctuate some of her punch lines.) Later, watching aughts cable, she got into sharp-tongued women comedians like Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin; she discovered the former on E!’s “Fashion Police” and the latter on the Bravo reality show “My Life on the D-List.” Sherman began going to the city with friends to watch standup (“We’d be, like, ‘Louis C.K. is doing a drop-in at the Creek and the Cave!’ ”) and joined the improv club at Great Neck South High School, putting up comedy shows in the basement of the local library, which was home to a youth community center called Levels. For many, this would have meant social suicide (“If you went to Levels, you had a taint on you,” Ronald Bronstein, a fellow Great Neck native who executive-produced Sherman’s special and was instrumental in getting it made, told me.) Sherman didn’t mind hanging with the freaks, though. “I thought Levels was cool because everyone was a crazy fucking loser,” she said. Her comedy cohort in high school also gave her the nickname “Squirm”: “They called me ‘Squirmin’ Sherman’ because I was sort of skinny and gross.”