However, as soon as Sherman began her performance, storming onto the stage 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 had initially anticipated. Wearing a colorful polka-dot shirt, red tie, and voluminous rainbow trousers, with a casual mullet haircut, Sherman, thirty-two, delivered a performance that was devoted almost entirely to a pointed discussion of the debasement of the human body—mainly her own. She complained for a long time, with disgusting sounds very close to the microphone, that her huge sportswear was being “sucked” into her “hole”; she waxed poetic about vaginal discharge and excessive sweating, citing “wasabi stains” on the armpits of her T-shirt and underwear that “look like [her] pussy sneezed into him. She spoke at length about pee and poop, noting that for her, “pee and poop are not a binary, they're a fucking spectrum.” . . my piss is so thick and my shit is so runny, no matter what I do in the bathroom, honey, I'll go number 1.5, hey!” (“What comedy show do you think you're watching tonight?” she asked, as the audience groaned and laughed.) Her body hair was also worthy of a monologue: Her pubic thatch is so thick, she says, that it could be made into a “wicker 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 was seen naked: her huge bush, kudzu-like armpit hair, a wide-spread vulva, and her prosthetic labia hanging almost to her feet. “I can’t go to the beach, my lips are so long and swollen and disgusting, they feel like they’re banging between my knees, like a pendulum in a grandfather clock,” she began. Her labia, she said, looked like a turkey wattle, or an open-faced Reuben sandwich, or the jaws of an old English mastiff, “and just as slobbery!” She went on and on and on, and the horrifying images on the screen kept appearing: Sherman daintily biting those fancy lips before squeezing them into her tiny bikini bottoms, or putting deli meat on her vaginal opening and throwing in a jar of Thousand Island dressing for good measure (“my vibrator is a pickle spear and a napkin!”), or spreading her legs wide open to reveal a mouth that flops out with a creepy smile. thick menstrual blood between teeth. “Look at the screen!” Sherman screamed at the spectators, many of whom screamed in horror. Peppering his jokes with the macho stand-up comedian's words: “You know what I mean?” and “Are you kidding me?” displaying a completely contradictory, completely unrelenting horror of the female body, she looked like some bizarre mixture of Rodney Dangerfield and Hannah Wilk.
After the taping, I went to say hello to Sherman in her dressing room, where she sat huddled on the couch next to her longtime boyfriend, Dan Sloan, a lovable academic. Up close she seemed fragile and very beautiful. She took off her polka dot clown top and was left in a white undershirt, and with glittery eye shadow and her hair pulled out of her face, she suddenly looked a lot like a sweet, upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Long Island, which is, in a way, exactly what she is. Rising from the sofa, she greeted me with a hug, but retreated almost immediately. “I’m really sorry, am I really sweating?” she asked, seeming genuinely concerned.
It was not a foregone conclusion that Sarah Sherman would end up becoming Sarah Squirm. She grew up in Great Neck, right behind the Peter Luger Steak House on Long Island. Her father owns a children's clothing company and drives the LIRR to his office in the garment district every day; her mother is a retired teacher; her younger brother, who now lives in the city, does market research. She's still very close to all of them, although, as she notes, her parents are “hot and I'm kind of reactionary to them.” As a teenager, she was a good student, excelled in sports, ran, and worked as a lifeguard and swimming teacher at a local pool in the summers. She wasn't one of the popular kids, but she was very well liked. “I was funny, and when you're funny you can be really socially mobile,” she told me. One day, the defender even asked her out on a date, but she was not interested. What is she was From a young age he was interested in a career as a comedian.
Growing up, her biggest influence was network television. She was obsessed with sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “The Nanny,” mainstream shows filled with Tri-State Jewish humor. (In her act, she still uses the bass note of the Seinfeld theme to punctuate some of her punchlines.) Later, while watching cable television, she became fascinated by sharp-tongued female comedians like Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin; She discovered the first on E!'s Fashion Police and the second on the Bravo reality show My D-List Life. Sherman began going into town with friends to see stand-up (“We were like, 'Louis C.K. is coming to Scream and Cave!'”) and joined the improv club at Great Neck South High School, doing comedy shows in the basement of the local library, which housed a youth community center called Levels. For many, this would mean social suicide (“If you went to Levels, you were infected,” Ronald Bronstein, a Great Neck native who was an executive producer of Sherman’s special and was instrumental in its creation, told me.) But Sherman didn’t mind hanging out with freaks. “I thought Levels was cool because everyone was a crazy loser,” she said. Her high school comedy group also gave her the nickname “Squirm”: “They called me 'Squirmin' Sherman' because I was kind of skinny and rough.”
