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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Live + In the Flesh

Sarah Sherman

HBO · 2025 · 58 min

An hour of body-horror stand-up and cartoon gore in Brooklyn.

Watch on HBO(opens in a new tab)

Released , on HBO.

Most comics rely on a microphone and a stool. Sarah Sherman relies on stop-motion viscera, frantic shrieking, and an opening sketch where John Waters prods her rotting, neon-drenched corpse before shoving her onstage. She treats the room like an infected playpen, rattling through routines about hangnails, diarrhea, and bodily decay with the energy of a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

Taped at The Bell House in Brooklyn and directed by Cody Critcheloe, the set premiered on HBO in December 2025. Sherman was four seasons into her run on Saturday Night Live, where she had carved out a profile for baiting Colin Jost and sneaking prosthetic body horror onto network television. This hour drops standard broadcast restrictions entirely, returning directly to the gross-out multimedia chaos of her Chicago live show, Helltrap Nightmare.

Stop-motion animation interrupts the stand-up throughout, illustrating journeys through intestinal tracts and showers of fluorescent vomit.

It is an assault of tactile filth aimed squarely at viewers weary of conventional club routines. Anyone expecting polite observational humor about dating in New York will be repelled inside the first five minutes.

Notable bits & set list

8 bits

  1. Backstage pre-show interaction with John Waters.

    An opening sketch where Waters finds Sherman backstage as an incoherent pile of bones, guts, mush, and eyeballs, urging her to go out and remind audiences why God invented the barf bag.

  2. Explosive diarrhea and flipping off the audience.

    Opening the stand-up set by flipping the double bird and going on an extended rant about explosive bowel movements to immediately establish expectations.

  3. Canvassing for Bernie Sanders in 2020.

    Contemplating the horror of knocking on doors dressed in her extreme Sarah Squirm makeup and look to solicit votes for Sanders.

  4. Long Island father trying to understand her life.

    Observing her father struggling to make sense of her comedic persona and her boyfriend.

  5. Gym and athleisure culture.

    Imagining herself wearing modern athletic wear and attempting to work out next to everyday gym-goers.

  6. Being a 'cool Jew' and Middle Eastern politics.

    Declaring that she supports a free Palestine because she is Jewish and loves anything that is free.

  7. Multimedia presentations of vocal cords and nude beach prosthetics.

    Displaying endoscopic video purportedly of her vocal cords and footage of herself nude on a beach fitted with grotesquely distorted breast and genital prosthetics.

  8. Audio cues and Seinfeld riffs.

    Using a literal foot pedal onstage to trigger the jazzy slap-bass theme from Seinfeld as punctuation.

How it plays

Tone
Gross-out, irreverent, unhinged, absurd, and gleefully tasteless body horror.
On stage
Her grotesque alter ego Sarah Squirm; an abrasive, energetic, gleefully disgusting 'professional poop clown' combining body-horror aesthetics, self-deprecating Jewish humor, and colorful clown fashion.
Pace
Relentless, high-momentum, and aggressive, described as having Tasmanian-devil energy with shrieking vocal work, physical cavorting, and full-speed intensity.
About
body horror and physical deformities, bodily fluids and excrement, genitalia and sex organs, Jewish identity and self-deprecation, fitness and the gym, politics

What the critics said

Critical response was positive among major review outlets, highlighting Sherman's fearless audacity, boundless momentum, and deliberate elevation of gross-out comedy into surreal body horror, though noting its unapologetically abrasive and divisive nature.

In the room: Interactive, shock-filled, and polarized; audience members engaged in willing roasting while reacting with winces and repulsion to extreme gross-out visuals and material.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: nowtv.com, press.wbd.com, imdb.com, wsj.com, nytimes.com, decider.com, metacritic.com, en.wikipedia.org, variety.com, vogue.com.

Backstory

Sherman performed as her grotesque, body-horror alter ego 'Sarah Squirm', stepping outside the standards and practices constraints of network television (NBC) to present an uncensored hour on HBO.

Details

Released
Taped
The Bell House, Brooklyn
Runtime
58 min
Where
HBO
Director
Cody Critcheloe
Topics

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