I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: October 31, 2023] Sarah Sherman

After Crooks and Nannies, we waited a few minutes, honestly hoping that JBrekkie would come on stage soon so we could get home early, when out came a a woman in a clown suit.  It took us a moment to realize that we recognized her from the Adam Sandler film You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.  She was weird and funny.

Turns out she was a special surprise Halloween guest for this show.  Michelle Zauner later said that she didn’t ask to perform, she just came out and insisted on it.  Which is pretty funny.

So Sherman started doing her routine.

I have no idea what her stand up is normally like.  If this was a typical gig for her, just shortened to twenty minutes.  Or if she was trying stuff out or what.  But her stand up is deliberately annoying, I believe.

I was annoyed by the guys behind us who kept saying things like “why would you have a stand up comedian come out between bands.”  I mean, it’s Halloween it’s supposed to be fun, shut up.

She does a lengthy bit about New York “you know what I’m tawkin’ about.”  She repeats that line “you know what I’m tawkin’ about” about forty times.  Funny, not funny, then funny, then not funny then funny again.

She also makes this grunting sound and pretends to be offensive guys.  Pretty funny, but really long.

And some very graphic talk about her genitals–clearly going for shock and gross.  And then yelling at imagined men in the audience “mu eyes are up here.”

Then she showed a video with Jigsaw (I assume her in costume?) from the Saw movie franchise.  He threaten to unpixelate an image of the damage she’d done to the greenroom bathroom.  The rest of the video was a series of really gross images )peeling back fingernails, popping (fake oversized) zits.

She made fun of Philly a bunch and then said I can win you back in 5 seconds, “Go Birds.”  That made my wife and I laugh harder than just about anything because we always joke that that’s all you have to say in Philly to get people to like you.

The bits were funny but the annoying parts went on too long (which is the point I suppose).

The only bad thing is that for some reason the Japanese Breakfast crew was not setting up their gear during this stand up (with a huge screen covering the stage), so it meant that the end of the show was like 40 minutes later than originally planned.

When Sherman came back out later to introduce the band (while dressed as Gollum), it was just as weird and funny and unsettling.

I didn’t know she went by Sarah Squirm, but I can see that she has cultivated that persona for sure.