'SNL's Sarah Squirm Accidentally Gave Herself A Serious Health Scare From A "Jackass-Style Prank"

Absurdist comedy giant and Saturday Night Live star Sarah Squirm once discovered a lump in her breast in the middle of a tour, and she didn’t even have time to fly out to Colin Jost for an examination.

It’s no secret for any kind of touring performer that life on the road takes a toll on your body. Whether the change is some weight gain from eating too much fast food, a biochemical imbalance from the irregular sleep schedule or a tragically common drug habit from the constant stress and euphoria of showbiz, no comedian, musician or exhibitionist circus performer’s body has ever been the same before and after. As two of those three, Squirm has ample experience with the health scares of a touring artist, and, during a recent podcast appearance, she recalled one of them in graphic detail.

On the most recent episode of The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi, Squirm explained how, during a particularly taxing tour, she developed a lump in her breast that she feared could be serious, only to find out from a doctor that it was nothing that Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margera haven’t suffered dozens of times.

“I'm on tour, and, you know – do you ever do a tour that's just all fly-ins every single day?” Squirm asked her host as she began her story, “It makes your body kind of go crazy, because you're, like, going up and down in the sky. Well, also, another thing I think is that, when you go into the realm of angels, you kind of – you shouldn't be in the sky! Your body's going to react to it!”

In Squirm's case, she believed that the constant air travel may have caused a concerning growth within her body. “I could feel a lump in my breast,” Squirm explained, “And you know, my boyfriend's on tour with me, Jack Bensinger's on tour with me, and they're like, ‘This is just one of your things where you think your eye is smallening.’” Earlier in the podcast episode, Squirm explained her theory that her eyes are shrinking.

“So I go to the doctor, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, you do (have a lump in your breast),’” Squirm continued, “They had to do a biopsy, and while they're digging into my shit, they're like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a lump, it's good that you're here!' Three days, no sleep, I'm freaking out.”

Then, “I get a call, ‘So, we biopsied the lump, it’s sort of a scar tissue. Did you ever hit your breast, or bump into something, (or have) an accident?” Squirm recalled the doctor asking her, “I go full Sherlock mind palace, flash back to ten years earlier when I did have my friend punch me in the breast as hard as he could for a Jackass-style prank.”

Back in 2023, Squirm explained the bit that would later lead to medical terror and sleepless nights to Mike Birbiglia on his Working it Out Podcast, starting with, “This is a humiliating story, actually.”

“I was like, ‘Oh! I could do a Jackass bit!’ And then, I was like, making this whole project where I, like, had made these big paper mache boobs that, when you punched them they exploded blood,” Squirm remembered, “We were testing it out, and I had my friend punch me in the boob, and it hurt so bad!”

Squirm continued, “It ruptured a blood vessel in my boob, and my nipple was gushing blood for, like, days.”

Said Birbiglia, “This podcast is over.”