Sarah Sherman is Saturday Night Live’s Chaotic Good Secret Weapon

It’s not a stretch to say that, right now, Saturday Night Live is having an identity crisis. Since the departures of Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong in back-to-back seasons nearly two years ago, the show has been without a bonafide star who can fill even the most mundane spaces of any given sketch. You can look back at every great era of SNL and pinpoint either one hero whose talents commanded the focus of every sketch they were in (Eddie Murphy comes to mind immediately, but Will Ferrell fits the bill, too) or, at the very least, an ensemble of comedians who, together, built a top-to-bottom powerhouse of humor (think Season 32, which featured Fred Armison, Bill Hader, Will Forte, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Jason Sudeikis, Kenan Thompson and Kristen Wiig all in one cast). Everyone and their mother has said, at least once in their lifetime, that “SNL isn’t as funny as it once was” and, as the show knocks on the door of its golden jubilee, it is sorely in need of a miracle to return to form. But I don’t think it needs to look very far to find the right answer.

“I hope I’m interesting,” Sarah Sherman says at the beginning of our interview. It’s a hell of an opener, especially coming from the one current SNL cast member who is, above and beyond, the textbook-definition of “interesting.” Sherman joined the show as a featured player back in October 2021, ahead of its 47th season, and, this past autumn, was promoted to repertory status. On paper, a body horror comic known as “Sarah Squirm” (and who wears bright, over-the-top outfits and sports a bitchin’ mullet) joining the stable of a sketch show that is, let’s face it, more often tepid than daring, doesn’t work. But, Sherman is a unique case. As a veteran of the stand-up circuit for more than 10 years now, that part of her oeuvre serves her well in Studio H8.

On the flip-side, her experience with her touring noise-and-comedy show Helltrap Nightmare—and even her multimedia resumé (including, most prominently, “The Sarah Vaccine”)—make Sherman a real wild card with a knack for gross-out humor, the kind of off-their-rocker, not-ready-for-primetime spitfuck that rarely gets to tout their chops on NBC. Plus, it’s not every day that, in the span of five years, somebody goes from performing on-stage at Cafe Mustache in a metallic jumpsuit adorned with hand-painted tits to staring down the barrel of a camera on Weekend Update in a full suit that hawked its color palette from a Candy Land game board. This kind of trajectory just doesn’t happen anymore, and SNL has only ever taken chances on such oddballs once in a blue moon.

But like I said, Sarah Sherman is different. She’s a swiss-army knife in a toolbox of dependables. She’s become the queen of the 10-to-1 slot on SNL, unafraid of breaking out a sketch like “Eyes” at the end of an early-season episode piloted by a languid host like Brendan Gleeson. It’s not the type of role just anyone can play and, in fact, few cast members have ever left such a distinctive mark on the part of the show meant for the idiosyncratic sketches that flirt between all-out chaos and the bottom of a slush pile. But Sherman isn’t just a one-trick pony. She’s able to don any type of trope and put some charm into it, whether it’s as the mom to a 40-year-old baby played by Adam Driver or as a hated ex-girlfriend getting shit-talked by the Please Don’t Destroy boys. Time and time again, Sherman’s malleability is her milieu.

When I get on the phone with Sherman, she’s just gotten back from a run of weekend shows in Bloomington, Indiana. “I was really happy to see a Steak ‘n Shake,” she gestures, as she runs around her apartment trying to find her work badge in preparation for SNL’s return from its brief winter hiatus this week. And, as is the case with every time the show takes a multi-week break, Sherman uses that time off to grease the wheel of her stand-up routine. But, when you’re tasked with putting together a brand new show in a matter of days week after week, it’s no surprise that the training wheels briefly get put back on when there’s a gap in episodes. “I’ll be doing my stand-up stuff and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t remember how to do stand-up!’ And then, by the end of five shows, I was finally like, ‘You know what? I do remember how to do this again’—and just in time for me to remember how to do that, I go back to the other thing I don’t know how to do,” Sherman confirms.

Ever the New Yorker, Sherman’s initial interest in comedy hit when, surprise, surprise, she started watching Seinfeld in the 2000s. “It’s never like I saw that and thought, ‘Oh, I could do that,’” she insists. “But, once you grow up on the funniest thing possible… I loved comedy and I knew that I wanted to be a comedian.” From an early age, she was obsessed with Shari Lewis and her sock puppet Lamb Chop, but Sherman comes from a funny family. “My dad is the funniest person to ever live,” she asserts—which is true, given that he showed up to The Tonight Show wearing a T-shirt with a picture of himself on it. “I would do annoying things as a little kid, like clear the table at Thanksgiving and get up on it and put on a little show. I would even get good roles in the plays in middle school. I had one line in Anything Goes and you better believe I fucking milked the shit out of it.” What was that one line? “All ashore that’s going ashore,” of course. “Milk it if you got it,” Sherman concludes, admonishing all remnants of “smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.”

Sherman was a fixture in her high school improv group, but she was rejected from Northwestern’s troupe once she got to college—a tidbit that nearly every interviewer brings up. “Just thinking about my whole life as a comedian, it’s funny what other people think was impactful,” she says. “I feel like someone brought it up and forced that into the narrative of my career. It helps with a narrative of, like, ‘Oh, no, rejection helps you.’ I doth protest too much, I’m like ‘This doesn’t affect me! I’m actually pissed off that anyone brings it up!’ You’re like, ‘Actually, it probably does affect me.’” But while she was a student in Evanston, Sherman started going to open mics at a coffee shop called Caffeine. “I think there’s a barrier of entry with stand-up because of age,” she says. “I didn’t really know where you could do stand-up that wasn’t a bar. But I remember I couldn’t believe how awesome it was. It was so empowering to be 18, 19, whatever, and be like, ‘I wanna go do something, so I’m gonna go do it. I don’t live in my parents’ house anymore.’”

Her first open mic, however, happened in high school at a place called the Hog Pit—a now-shuttered BBQ restaurant—on W 26th Street in Manhattan. After taking the Long Island Railroad into the city with her friend Ethan and waiting in line forever, she finally got on stage wearing a 1970s golf polo with a huge collar and rockabilly wingtip shoes and told a joke about taking her virginity to the Antiques Roadshow and the authenticators estimate that it’s 1,000 years old. Much to her dismay, Sherman bombed her five-minutes. “I was kind of traumatized, because the host made fun of my bowtie,” she adds. “I’m literally wearing a tie right now. I haven’t changed at all. I’m actually wearing an outfit right now that looks exactly like the one I wore to my first open mic at 16. I still have the shirt and I still wear it. I was so excited to tell my jokes, and then just nothing.”

Before Sherman moved to Los Angeles in 2019, she was asked to do showcases for SNL three times at the iO in Chicago. She was told to do five characters in five minutes, but could never get over the hump with the suits in attendance. “It’s funny, because I wonder who was at those showcases. I wonder if they’re my co-workers now. They must be,” Sherman says. “You know, I was doing something that I thought I had to do. I thought I had to do thse characters—it was no skin off my back. I tried doing the characters in my stand-up a little bit and it just wasn’t working.”

When she booked Just For Laughs a few years later, all it took was one bit where Sherman referred to her vagina as “pastrami-like pussy lips” for her to score a major SNL audition. “It’s like a nice old story about being yourself, you know?” Sherman says with a wink. “A lot of people think there’s a lot of rules on how to get somewhere. ‘If you want to get a job at this thing, you have to do this, this and this.’ Now, after COVID, the landscape has changed so much. There are no rules. It’s a total free-for-all. It’s like, do what you think is funny. Do what you think is good. Be yourself.” For a show that fired Jenny Slate after one season—which included her dropping a consequential F-bomb in her first episode—it’s especially refreshing to see Lorne Michaels and his flock open themselves up to a brand of comedy that doesn’t just rest on the shoulders of not-quite-on-the-nose impressions and playing-it-safe recurring characters. SNL still takes risks, even when its ongoing streak of middle-line-straddling seems to suggest otherwise.

While there’s a legendary story about Sherman’s friend Tommy getting so grossed out by her shtick in Portland, Oregon that he had to go puke in the parking lot mid-set (“Shoutout to Tommy,” she says), she cites someone gifting her a little severed toe while on tour with Helltrap Nightmare as one of those “I’m resonating with people, my shit is landing” moments. “I love touring,” Sherman says, “because freaks are everywhere. We did a show in Asheville, North Carolina, and a car-full of freaky kids showed up with figurines that they had made of everyone in the show. And I still have mine! It’s sitting on my shelf right now. It’s a Sarah Squirm figure, it’s posable. It says ‘This is a toy. Please do not eat it, as it could possibly kill you’ on it. It’s really cute. And, it’s funny—it’s actually wearing these overalls I made and I actually wore those overalls on my first Weekend Update appearance.”

Born on Facebook while Sherman was at Northwestern, the Helltrap Nightmare show became something of a Chicago comedic landmark—as it performed monthly at the Hideout in town for years and, until Sherman, Scott Egleston and the Shrimp Boys (Wyatt Fair, Luke Taylor and David Brown) all moved out to LA, helped make the five of them savants of strangeness in the Midwest. But Sherman is hesitant to label the combination of “sketch comedy, stand-up and weirdo shit” on Helltrap Nightmare as “performance art.” “‘Performance art’ is a trite way to put it,” she says. “I feel like, when you hear ‘performance art,’ you think ‘not funny.’ But it was just people being funny and freaky.” Sherman ran around with a bunch of people in the Chicago electronic/noise music scene, as well as avant garde comedians and drag queens. Because Chicago is the DIY capital of the world, she was able to do basement shows and Laugh Factory sets in the same week. She’d perform for bachelorette parties visiting from Indiana and then turn around and tell jokes to metalheads while opening for Meat Wave.

Sherman’s connection to music is an ongoing love affair. In the last few years alone, she’s appeared in music videos for NNAMDÏ’s “Touchdown” and IAN SWEET’s “Your Spit,” and she’s pretty keen on drawing connections between comedy and noise rock and how, at the end of the day, her routines spiritually make sense in those conversations, too. “It can be uniquely hilarious,” Sherman says. “I came up with noise musicians like Forced Into Femininity, and Jill Flanagan would have a bag of crickets she was shaking around. This band Blood Licker would play guitar with a vibrator. There was all of this out-there stuff, which would encourage me to be out there also. And my style of stand-up, because that’s where I was performing, became very abrasive and aggressive and confrontational. I’m not a musician and I don’t know how to play an instrument, but my voice is just as loud and aggressive and painful to the ears, possibly.”

When Sherman returns to stand-up during her time off from SNL, she is jumping back into Sarah Squirm and “going full-throttle” with it. In 2022, she was opening shows for Adam Sandler and, on the surface, it probably seems like Sherman’s penchant for carrying around Ziploc bags full of her own pubes might not coalesce well with the Sandman’s own shtick—but their time sharing a bill, exploding bits and all, was a marriage made in Heaven (which makes sense, given that Sherman recently stole the show in Sandler’s Netflix comedy, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah). Not only was it Sherman’s first time playing arenas—a learning experience you can’t truly prepare for—but she got a chance to workshop different material with unique audiences at each date and watch a community of artists support one another.

“[Sandler] travels with a group of comedians who all came up together and are all very supportive and loving and have such a history and they give each other feedback on their jokes,” Sherman says. “And that inspired me, because I would get off stage and David Spade would give me a punch-up on one of my jokes. And I’m like, ‘David Spade just gave me a fucking punch-up on one of my jokes and I can have it? And then I tell that joke and people think I wrote it?’ It inspired me. Even though stand-up feels like a solo sport, last time I went on tour with my friend Jack Bensinger, we were watching each other’s set every night and giving each other punch-ups on each other’s jokes. [Comedy] can still feel like a communal thing; it doesn’t have to feel like you’re all on your own.”

That communal energy remains a safety net that Sherman gets to revel in when she’s at Rockefeller Center for 20+ SNL episodes a year. Since joining the cast, one of her slam-dunk routines involves her hopping on Weekend Update—either as herself or as a character—and roasting Colin Jost. In the comments section for her recent Update performance (“CJ Rossitano on Winning the SNL Ticket Lottery”), on YouTube, one user sharply points out that “James Austin Johnson is the impressionist, Mikey Day is the straight man, and Sarah’s role is to destroy Colin on Weekend Update.” And it’s true—audiences can rely on Sherman and Jost going pound-for-pound at least a few times every season. It might seem like, when the cameras are rolling, Jost is as shocked as we are about what’s being thrown at him, but he’s just as in on the ruse as Sherman before dress rehearsal hits.

“He’s extremely supportive, and he will even give notes to make it funnier at his own expense,” Sherman says. “He’s great. At first, I was like, ‘I can’t keep doing the same shtick over and over again, I have to come up with something new.’ But the thing is, we are figuring out a way for it to be different every time, within the structure of ‘Okay, we know that the goal, at the end of the day, is we’re making fun of Colin.’ We’re having so much fun thinking five-dimensionally about it. The CJ Rossitano sketch was Martin Herlihy’s idea. Last year, we started roasting [Jost] as a character, which is a way for me to—I’m also learning to do the show as we go. I don’t come from characters as much as I come from stand-up. We did this character last year, Genesis Fry, who was a meditation guru—and that character actually came from a stand-up set I had, so I felt like I had a foundation there. And then that evolved into being Colin’s agent and then that evolved into his long-lost son, which was us just finding new ways to explore the same theme—and that was a Martin Herlihy original.”

But every so often, Sarah Squirm comes out to play on SNL. Whether that means Sherman is going to play a woman with a singing, bile-spewing meatball (played perfectly by Oscar Isaac) on her neck, take the reins as Jewish Elvis on Austin Butler’s night of hosting (“I’m schmitzing like a friggin’ hound dog”), advertise Glamgina (“the makeup for your other face”) at the gynecologist, morph into a workplace version of Chucky trying to blow up the office, or play a coworker who gets her eyes surgically replaced with googly ones, it’s these sporadic flickers of absurdity where she really gets to cook—and it works more often than it doesn’t. But, when Dan Bulla and the Please Don’t Destroy boys write an Update piece for Sherman to run with, she knows it’s a can’t-miss crowd-pleaser waiting in the wings when the noxious stuff returns to the back-burner.

“I know that we’re making fun of Colin, which will always be funny now, but I’m not taking it for granted,” she says. “We know it works, and it gives me an opportunity to really move into character work—which is harder for me than being myself. We did Colin’s agent and it was not as successful, because I just hadn’t cracked that character. All the jokes were perfect, all of everything was there, but I was just not nailing it on the character side. And, like, that’s okay. I can be really hard on myself. It can be really hard when you’re writing with people who are so talented and then you’re like, ‘God, what am I bringing to the table here?’ With Colin’s agent, I felt like I had failed [Bulla, Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall] a little bit. I was so happy that CJ Rossitano worked out well, because I felt like I was able to bring something to it—which is funny because the character sounds a lot like me. A fun game that I gave for myself was I would just try to notice little behaviors that Colin would do and mimic them in realtime.”

I’ve been a Saturday Night Live fan ever since I could even really conceptualize what on-screen comedy even was. The history of comedians making the leap from a comedy club to that of Studio H8 has long been fascinating to me, especially when it’s players who didn’t get their start with the Groundlings or Second City. When it comes to the body horror and gnarly Sarah Squirm of it all, Sherman is pretty adamant that stand-up prepares you for wearing the clothes of SNL the most—even despite the differences in acting, presentation and performance style. But at the core of it all, Sherman’s brand of humor has prepared her for the failure that is inevitable when your only goal is to make everyone around you bust their guts laughing.

“Doing really abrasive gross-out comedy prepared me for knowing what it feels like to bomb,” she says. “It’s possible to bomb, I’ve done it. It never feels good, but I’ve gotten it out of my system. In my early 20s, I would bomb so hard that my head would start spinning and I wouldn’t remember what my jokes are. Now, at least I can pilot a ship even though it’s sinking. That’s what the beauty of SNL is—you’re making a show in a week and you’re making mistakes and people see it. I’ve made many mistakes on live television—and people see it and I get over it. I mean, I get over it by going to therapy three times a week.”

“The show is always interesting, because you never know what’s going to work,” Sherman continues. “I never know what’s going to work at table read, I never know what’s going to work in front of a live audience. I’m always surprised. And it’s good, because there’s no complacency. I never know what’s going to work, so I just stick with the things that I think are funny. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. The room [in Studio H8] is also much smaller than you think it is. Once I had gotten asked to screen-test for the job, I was like, ‘I can’t do this fucking job. I get stage fright as it is! I’m not gonna be able to perform on live television, there’s no fucking way.’ I was like, ‘I’ll do the screen test, but I can’t do this job. I would puke before every show. I would get so nervous!’ But then you get to H8, and the ceiling is really low and the room is small and warm and you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe you could do it.’ It doesn’t feel like you’re making mistakes in front of the whole world. It just feels like you’re making mistakes in front of all of your co-workers and your bosses.””

The first sketch Sherman remembers being a total trainwreck was the “Waiters” bit that she and Please Don’t Destroy wrote when Dakota Johnson hosted in January. She and Johnson play waitresses who keep getting people’s orders wrong because they refuse to write them down, and the kick of the joke is that they keep calling chicken fingers “chicken fongers.” “Writing night, we are up all night crying laughing,” Sherman says. “I was sobbing laughing. [The sketch] does well at the table read, during blocking we’re making each other laugh. And then, something happened where it didn’t connect with the audience and I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I was like, ‘Maybe I’m freezing up a little bit.’ I couldn’t tell where the audience lost trust in me, but you never know. And that’s why the show is live. It’s never a guarantee.”

I’ve always been drawn to the SNL cast members who aren’t afraid to do whatever it takes to get their niches to flourish. Martin Short was like that in 1984. Mike O’Brien’s “Grow-a-Guy” sketch will never recede from my personality. Even Will Ferrell eventually got his “human with cat mannerisms” sketch (which came from a bit he auditioned with in the ‘90s) on-air at one point. Sherman has had quite a number of those moments, but the instance that really showed her just how much of a home-run her comedy could be came in January 2023 on a sketch titled “Roller Coaster Accident” (which she co-wrote with Bulla)—when she and Michael B. Jordan played TV personalities who were windswept and their faces were blown open after getting stuck on a rollercoaster for too long.

“It was so fun, and they moved it to the top of the show—because it had good energy, people were laughing,” Sherman says. “I think people usually think of SNL as reserving really bizarro, out-there sketches until the end of the show, that 10-to-1 spot. But this was top-of-show, crazy hair, crazy prosthetics. Even though my comedy looks different, because I like using crazy prosthetics, I feel like so much comedy on the show is when there is a crazy thing happening. Heidi [Gardner] just did that sketch where bank robbers are holding up a bank and she’s like ‘Fine, you boys have your way with me in the back’ and she’s putting her butt up in the air. It doesn’t have a crazy prosthetic, but that’s crazy.”

Recently, Sherman has found herself relishing a new brand of character: the “straight man,” which has seen her cosplaying long-held tropes of the show, like the sweet, talk-you-off-the-ledge office girl when Josh Brolin’s “sandwich king” character gets bent out of shape, or a Hooters waitress who doesn’t make as much in tips as Sydney Sweeney. “It’s really fun. It’s just really fun for me, because you get to be in service of this joke,” Sherman says. “I get to be in drag, I’m wearing a long blonde wig and office clothes. I’m having a lot of fun doing that, because you know what your role is, [and the writers are] like ‘Okay, the game of the sketch is this, this is what the crazy joke is, Josh Brolin comes in and he’s a crazy sandwich guy.’ I just have to be straight man-ing him, like ‘You’re acting crazy, man.’ It’s fun, because you’re in service of this greater thing.”

Sherman being so open and excited about playing a dull side-character—who isn’t the star of the show but, instead, a crucial set piece hamming up someone else’s bit—is exactly what has made every on-the-rise star of Saturday Night Live unforgettable for 50 years. Farley did that. Aykroyd and Poehler, too. You see it at all of the key turning points in the show’s history, how the names we remember aren’t the ones always tugging on the spotlight. When Sherman pulls back the reins of grossness and lets her creative brain wander and fill in those gaps, it makes a bit like “Sarah News” all the more sweeter and it lets her comfort zone sprawl out even further.

If a Muppet came to life and got really stoked on exploding buttholes and making people livid with disgust, that would only scratch the surface of what Sarah Sherman is all about. While she’s not going to be drinking a vaccine cocktail of gasoline, juice and piss during the 10-to-1 slot anytime soon, she’s pretty excited about using her newfound status as a repertory cast member to really clamor on to the mundane rigors the show demands of its players. “Now that I’ve been there longer, people trust you more—so they’ll be like ‘Come be a straight man in my sketch,’” Sherman says. “They go ‘You know who’s going to stare with her mouth a little too wide open and her brow’s a little too furrowed? Sarah.’”

This Saturday, Saturday Night Live returns with first-time host Ramy Youssef and musical guest Travis Scott.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.