“We didn’t want to come across as preachy, but I didn’t want to come across as simultaneously not wanting to poke too much fun.” She’s up for trying others: “I want to be someone the writers can turn to to get something done.” The latter posed “an interesting challenge,” says Sherman, because it came just as negotiations between the union and the big media companies were under intense scrutiny. She has done an impression of New York Senator Chuck Schumer and another of SAG-AFTRA chief Fran Drescher. Sherman has an eye (one of her real ones) on other areas at “SNL,” too. “She basically memorized the sketch, and in between dress rehearsal and air she and I were on the set pacing out her steps so she could count how many she had to walk before she crashed into something.” “They put pinholes in her eyes so she could see the cue cards, but realistically, it was impossible.” Sherman told staffers that holes were going to ruin the sketch. When Sherman played an offbeat office worker who gets googly-eye transplants to impress her colleagues, the props she put on her face required that her real eyes be sealed shut, recalls Bulla. “It’s that granular for her, and all of her ideas start like that.” She’s on the phone with the people who build the puppets.” Sherman talks about visual effects and color palettes, he adds. She can cut to it from the germ of an idea. “Sarah never doesn’t have an answer for those questions. “You talk to every department and a lot of people are like, ‘Well, what should the wardrobe be?’” says Dan Bulla, a frequent writing partner for Sherman. It‘s an assignment Sherman takes seriously. At “SNL,” the people who write a skit also produce it, figuring out set design and props. It takes more than a clever catchphrase to create the bizarre characters for which Sherman has become known. Sherman’s appealing nature “gives her a lot of latitude to take risks where another person could not get away with it.” “It’s the messenger, not the message,” says Fink, who teaches sketch comedy at Harvard University and Chapman University. Die-hards may recall Dan Aykroyd in 1978 playing celebrity chef Julia Child with a nicked artery Jay Mohr in 1994 playing a nauseated cop Dana Carvey as the stumbling, dying “Massive Head-Wound Harry” in 1991 or the 2000 sketch during which Julianna Margulies and Will Ferrell chewed up food so that Chris Kattan could swallow it on camera.Īs a writer on the show in 1998, Hugh Fink helped craft a fake “SNL” TV commercial for a bowel-control product called “Oops, I Crapped My Pants.” Getting the audience to get past reactions of shock or nausea depends on the cast member at the center of the gag, he says. “SNL” has featured gross-out humor in the past, though it has never been the show’s main pillar. My goal is is to bring everybody under the same freak-show circus umbrella.” A lot of people think my big goal is to alienate people and to give them a big middle finger. I don’t want to alienate anyone because I do a lot of crazy stuff on stage. That audience that I perform for has a wide range of ages and temperaments. I know I can make people scream with horror or shriek with delight, but it’s a challenge to myself to make them laugh while they are screaming in horror, especially now that I’m on ‘SNL,’” Sherman tells Variety via Zoom. “I know I can elicit a wide range of reactions from audience members. In one of her stand-up comedy routines, Sherman shows a video of a snake slithering through what’s meant to look like “a giant cardboard butthole,” but she’s hoping to do more than shock her audience. But Sherman’s colorful antics “stand out in a clip-driven social-media environment,” and might be more of the moment in an era when many viewers get their “SNL” fix by watching viral videos from the show at times of their own choosing. “The dominant mode of comedy in the last 10 to 15 years is writerly - it’s talking and verbal jousting,” he says. “To me, she’s like if Pee-wee Herman and Gilda Radner had a comedy baby,” says Nick Marx, an associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, who is a co-editor of “Saturday Night Live and American TV,” a 2013 book of analytical essays about the show. Sarah Sherman, ‘Roller Coaster’ Sketch on SNL
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