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”.
There are one or two recognisably comic set-pieces: a riff sending up her home town’s civic pride, in a thick Noo Yawk accent; another on the labyrinthine ways her well-networked dad will find you a job. There’s a guided meditation set-piece, the joke of which – as conventional as Sherman gets – is that her narration is profoundly unsoothing, and sexually unsettling.
In the US, Sherman occasionally performs under the nom de guerre Sarah Squirm, and the second half here does exactly what it says on that tin. A series of DIY video animations illustrate a guess-what-you’re-looking-at quiz, in which the answers range from haemorrhoid blood, “pimple pop cream cheese” and turd emerging from an anus. Heartily though I sympathise with the politics of Sherman’s pushback against the prettifying of the female body, I averted my eyes from much of this stuff, not laughing but blanching.
But hey, it’s a strong flavour, and the image-making, when not completely gross, is often vividly strange – as when Sherman-on-screen makes Gaudi-esque sandcastles with her vagina. Not for the faint-hearted, but worth a look for those interested in far-out comedy.
At the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 21 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 22-25 August.
