Key Highlights
- Done with its shrieking, the moon clears its throat and begins to speak.
- “Sorry about that,” it says, giggling frantically, before the spooky strains of an organ start to play and the camera turns, swooping through the night sky toward a graveyard populated with modelling-clay body parts, plastic detritus, sticks, glitter, and garbage. In the graveyard, a bare butt pops up from the ground and releases a lusty fart; severed noses and ears spew acid-green snot; oozing, dismembered hands proffer dripping, worm-filled brains, and eyeballs swim in goo.
- Headstones bearing rude epithets (“Rest in Piss”; “Need Head”) stand in the fetid dirt.
- It’s “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” crossed with GWAR-style blood-and-guts and a dash of Sid’s torture chamber in Pixar’s “Toy Story.” It’s fun and it’s funny, it’s abrasive and it’s disgusting, it’s sexual but not sexy: it’s an apt opening into the mind and work of Sarah Squirm—the alter ego of the comedian and “Saturday Night Live” cast member Sarah Sherman—and the literal opening of her new HBO comedy special, “Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh.”On a drizzly night in late August, I attended a taping of this special at the Bell House, the performance venue in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood.
- Metal tracks from Rob Zombie and Korn were playing on the theatre lobby’s P. A.
