One Of The Best Comedy Specials Of 2025 Is Streaming Now – And You're Not Prepared For It

When it was announced that Sarah Sherman would be joining the cast of "Saturday Night Live" ahead of season 47 as a featured player, I honestly didn't think Lorne Michaels had it in him. Sherman is staggeringly talented and one of the most effortlessly funny comedians currently working today, but she's also a certified freak [complimentary]. "SNL" was not my introduction to Sherman, and I consider myself very fortunate to have caught her as Sarah Squirm on "Helltrap Nightmare," a traveling comedy show where DIY clowning melds with hideous comedy like a creature designed by Rob Bottin of "The Thing" fame. Sherman refers to Squirm as her "unholy alter ego," but she's given her center stage for her debut HBO comedy special, "Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh."

After four seasons of "SNL," Sherman is ready to introduce Squirm to the uninitiated to her "hilarious hour of bodily fluids, open-wound confessionals, and jokes that will leave scars on your soul," per the special's logline. "Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh" falls far more in line with "Helltrap Nightmare" than her incessant humiliation of Colin Jost on "Weekend Update," but as she wriggles around the stage with the Pope of Trash, John Waters, serving as her stage manager, this is a show that makes good on its promise to "Go out there and remind them why God invented the barf bag." It's both a delightfully disgusting hour of comedy and a surprising breath of fresh air when comedians are selling out to appease regimes committing human rights violations or committing the unforgivable act of being ... just predictably boring.

"Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh" is the furthest thing from predictable or boring, and those who only know her from "SNL" aren't prepared for her flavor of bedlam.

Seconds after Sarah Squirm arrives on stage, she tells the audience that she's been "blowing her back out" diarrheaing all day and refuses to apologize for actually using her butthole. If the stop-motion intro filled with glitter, slime, prosthetic guts, and a dangly eyeball didn't already set the tone, her first impression most certainly does. The following hour is an abrasive cavalcade of non-stop mayhem, roasting the audience and calling them perverts, humor rooted in self-deprecating body horror, and injecting visual artistry that looks like the mutated offspring of Screaming Mad George by way of "Pee-wee's Playhouse." DIY video projections, music cues, and special effects (including prosthetics by Izzy Galindo) ensure that the special never forgets that Squirm is the human embodiment of the twisted cartoons that dominated the early internet.

Looking like Paula Poundstone if she went through the Brundlefly machine with the Killer Klowns from Outer Space and whatever slime is used to make the gummy bugs in Mattel's Creepy Crawlers candymaker (or if Poundstone boned SpongeBob, as Squirm declares), Squirm unleashes an all-out assault on the senses from moment one. There's a running gag where she cues the "Seinfeld" bassline whenever she unloads an old-school one-liner that's funnier than anything Jerry Seinfeld has done in 30 years, and there are pre-recorded videos scattered throughout that are so gleefully repulsive and horrifying that it's hard not to fall in love with whatever is wrong with her. The fact that HBO isn't sending out Odorama cards (a la John Waters' "Polyester") feels like a missed opportunity to complete the sensory nightmare she and director Cody Critcheloe have created.

Wading through her maximalist psychosexual funhouse with glitter glued to her face, Sarah Squirm is never drowned out by the circus of her own making because her material hits just as hard as the spectacle. Sherman detonates the limitations of what a stand-up special can be, dropping feral albeit sneakily incisive bits about everything from buttholes to the medieval torture ritual known as the mammogram to gleefully tormenting the "highest member of the audience." Even her politics crackle with mischief: "I'm a cool Jew. I believe in a free Palestine ... Of course I do, I'm Jewish, and it's free."

A trend has emerged over the last 20 years or so where, for women comedians to be "taken seriously," their material often features a requisite section of self-deprecating humor (usually about their sexual exploits or the grotesquerie of menstruation), but absolutely no one is doing it like Sarah Squirm. There's a big difference between playfully ribbing about how many people you've slept with and graphically waxing poetic about the roughness of a clitoral hood. No matter how far she pushes the boundaries and how loudly the audience roars in disgust, the revolting honesty of Squirm's descriptions (and depictions) of "weird genitalia," body hair, and physical functions is mesmerizing. Her special will undoubtedly skeeve out normies but draw in sickos like maggots to a pile of garbage sitting out in the sun. I call dibs on the rotting "Meat By the Foot."

"Sarah Squirm: Live + In The Flesh" premieres on HBO on December 12, 2025, at 9 PM ET, and will be available to stream on HBO Max the same day.