‘SNL’ Lets Sarah Sherman Get Weird Again
Sarah Sherman is “missing wilding out a little bit,” she says in a New Yorker interview, and it’s easy to see what she means. In her early days on Saturday Night Live, the show indulged Sherman’s body-horror inclinations, with sketches in which singing, anthropomorphic meatballs grew out of her neck.
That weirdo vibe has changed quite a bit in Season 51. This year, you’re much more likely to see Sherman as “pretty girl in a wig,” like this sketch in which she plays a generic sorority girl.
Sherman has played enough by-the-numbers girlfriends and coworkers this season that it made me wonder if the shift was on purpose, an attempt by Sherman to prove she was castable in mainstream movies and streaming shows. But no, it sounds like she’s frustrated by the normalization, calling a bland blonde character “post-lobotomy sarah” on Instagram and telling New Yorker that she’s been “pissed off because I wasn’t getting my rocks off.”
She wrote one bit for Weekend Update in which she would have told Colin Jost about Kim Kardashian’s new Skims thong with built-in pubic hair. “We were laughing so much,” she said. “I was, like, ‘It’s stolen Ashkenazi valor.’” Lorne Michaels and company pulled the bit before it even got to the table read, proclaiming it “too dirty.”
So it was nice to see Sherman back in bizarro world last night on Weekend Update, playing a drunken raccoon recently in the news for ransacking a liquor store before passing out near the toilet. She comes out firing, dry-humping the Update desk while desperately trying to open a bottle of hooch without the benefit of opposable thumbs. “You know what they say, Colin, dress for the job you want,” she slurs. “Whore.”
The bit even gets more freaky when it switches to Ring camera mode, with the image of Sherman’s chittering raccoon reversed like an X-ray. In her hungover stupor, the raccoon wonders if DoorDash delivers apple cores or tin cans. “You know what’s good that you might not think is good?” she ponders. “Poop.”
If you’ve ever seen Sherman’s live show — soon to be brought to the world via a new HBO special — you know eating poop is right in her comedy wheelhouse. She belches and wretches before announcing to Jost that whatever was bothering her just came out the other end. It’s disgusting, Jost notes, and that’s the point. She dry-humps the desk again, inviting Colin back to her dumpster where she’ll ride his head like a Davy Crockett hat. It's deliriously, raunchily, gloriously weird stuff.
Too much “let’s eat poop” humor would wear out its welcome pretty quickly, but it’s nice to see the show hasn’t abandoned Sherman’s sensibilities altogether. It doesn’t have to happen on every show, but it does everyone some good when SNL allows Sherman to get her comedy rocks off.
