Sarah Sherman is a lot tougher than you think

As soon as Sherman began her set, storming the stage with her middle fingers 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, rainbow baggy pants, and her hair cut into a mullet, Sherman, 32, gave a performance that was almost entirely subservient to a harsh discussion of the baseness of the human body — mostly her own. She complained at length, with repulsive sound effects and very close to the microphone, that her oversized gym clothes were “sucking” into her “hole”; She waxed poetic about her vaginal discharge and excessive sweating, citing “wasabi stains” on the armpits of her shirt and underwear that “looked like… [her] “My pee’s so thick and my poop’s so runny, no matter what I do in the bathroom, honey, I’m going to go 1.5, hey!” (“What kind of comedy show do you think you’re going to see tonight?” she asked, as the audience groaned and laughed.) Her body hair was also worthy of a monologue: Her pubic stubble is so thick that she could make a “wicker basket” out of it, and her nipple hair is “so long that I could tie her breasts together to get amazing cleavage.”

Toward the end of the show, Sherman showed a PowerPoint video combining real footage and claymation, in which she is seen naked—her bush is huge, her armpit hair looks like kudzu, her vulva is spread wide, and her tiny labia, made from prosthetics, hang down almost to her feet. “I can’t go to the beach,” she began, “my lips are long and swollen and disgusting, as if they were knocking between my knees like a pendulum on a grandfather clock.” She said her labia looked like turkey meat, an open-faced Reuben sandwich, or the mouths of an Old English Mastiff, “and like saliva too!” She screamed over and over, and the horrifying images on the screen kept coming: Sherman gently biting those grotesque lips before wrestling them into a tiny pair of bikinis, or layering delicious flesh on her vaginal opening and throwing a jar of Thousand Island sauce in there for good measure (“My vibrator is a pickle-and-handkerchief spear!”), or spreading her legs wide to reveal a mouth, eerily smiling, gushing out menstrual blood. Between his teeth. “Look at the screen!” Sherman shouted to the crowd, many of whom were screaming in horrified joy. She airs her jokes with the macho comedian “Do You Know What I Mean?” and “Are you kidding me?” While presenting completely confrontational and completely unremitting female body horror, she was like a strange combination of Rodney Dangerfield and Hannah Welk.

After taping, I went to say hello to Sherman in the dressing room, where she sat on the sofa next to her boyfriend, Dan Sloan, an academic with a pretty face. Up close, she was so thin and beautiful. She had taken off her polka-dot clown shirt and was wearing a white undershirt, and with her bright eye shadow and hair swept back from her face, she suddenly looked like a nice upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Long Island, which is, more or less, exactly what she is. She got up from the couch, greeted me with a hug, but backed away almost immediately. “I’m so sorry, am I really sweaty?” She asked, sounding genuinely worried.

It was not expected that Sarah Sherman would eventually become Sarah Squirm. I grew up in Great Neck, right behind the Long Island location of Peter Luger Steakhouse. Her father owns a children’s clothing company and takes 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, works in market research. She remains 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 and excelled at sports, running track, and worked in the summer as a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the local pool. She wasn’t exactly one of the popular kids, but she was very popular. “I was funny, and when you’re funny, you can be really socially mobile,” she told me. The quarterback even asked her out one year, but she wasn’t interested. What is it He was From a young age, he was interested in being a comedian.

Her first influences came as a child from network television. She was obsessed with sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “The Nanny” — mainstream shows filled with Jewish humor in the Tri-States. (In her set, she still uses the slap-bass riff of the “Seinfeld” theme to punctuate some of her punch lines.) Later, while watching Cable Oates, she got into sharp-tongued female comedians like Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin; I discovered the first on E!’s “Fashion Police” podcast. And last on the Bravo reality show “My Life on the D-List.” Sherman began going into town with friends to watch stand-up comedy shows (“We’d be like, ‘Louis C.K. pays a quick visit to the creek and the cave!’”) and joined the improv club at Great Neck South High School, performing comedy routines in the basement of the local library, which was home to a community center for young people called Levels. For many, this meant social suicide (“If I go to… Levels, you’ll have a disgrace.” Sherman, however, didn’t mind hanging out with the freaks. “I thought the movie Levels was cool because everyone was crazy losers,” she said. Her high school comedy group also nicknamed her “Squirm”: “They called me ‘Squirmin’ Sherman’ because I was skinny and kind of disgusting.”