The New Yorker:

The comedian is chafing against playing a pretty girl in a wig on “S.N.L.” In her new HBO special, “Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh,” the focus is body horror.

By Naomi Fry

We begin deep within a wet, gaping orifice—a laryngeal canal so red and glistening it almost looks diseased. As we rush up and out of it, we hear a jarring, Tarzan-like scream, and we arrive, face to face, with a meaty, waggling tongue, glinting teeth, bulging eyes, and a thin, twitching mustache. These startling human features belong to a round gray moon, whose cratered surface recalls the acne-scarred cheeks of, say, a fortyish weirdo who still lives with his elderly mother. Done with its shrieking, the moon clears its throat and begins to speak. “Sorry about that,” it says, giggling frantically, before the spooky strains of an organ start to play and the camera turns, swooping through the night sky toward a graveyard populated with modelling-clay body parts, plastic detritus, sticks, glitter, and garbage.

In the graveyard, a bare butt pops up from the ground and releases a lusty fart; severed noses and ears spew acid-green snot; oozing, dismembered hands proffer dripping, worm-filled brains, and eyeballs swim in goo. Headstones bearing rude epithets (“Rest in Piss”; “Need Head”) stand in the fetid dirt. It’s “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” crossed with GWAR-style blood-and-guts and a dash of Sid’s torture chamber in Pixar’s “Toy Story.” It’s fun and it’s funny, it’s abrasive and it’s disgusting, it’s sexual but not sexy: it’s an apt opening into the mind and work of Sarah Squirm—the alter ego of the comedian and “Saturday Night Live” cast member Sarah Sherman—and the literal opening of her new HBO comedy special, “Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh.”

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