Delightfully weird, says the pre-publicity. I’m not sure that covers it. Sarah Sherman – Long Island native, featured player on Saturday Night Live – delivers to the fringe one of those late-night, is-this-really-happening? shows that feel like a fever dream. There’s a lot of laughter, much of it Sherman’s own. But what I’m watching, while it’s bewildering, queasy, manic and wearing a clown suit, is almost never uncomplicatedly funny.
If the experience was, for this viewer, as often alienating as enjoyable, it’s clear there’s something interesting going on: something pitched into uncharted space between anti-comedy, performance art and body horror. You could call it “queering the narrative of comedy by not being funny and just being scary”, as Sherman does, tongue firmly in cheek. There’s certainly nothing straight about the show, which feels substantially made up on the hoof, as the 29-year-old keens at reviewers to give her five stars, squawks about “Saint Arthur’s Seat” in a bad cockney accent and weighs up the relative virtues of haggis and her “pussy”.
