Sarah Squirm, aka Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman, is making amends. Specifically, she’s using her Instagram account to reach out to all the worms she may have kidnapped, harmed or even murdered in the name of comedy.
What drove Sherman to commit such crimes in the first place? To reveal her motive, she takes us back to her high school days when “everyone called me Sarah Squirm — whatever — because I was disgusting.”
Because of the Squirm in her new moniker, she soon learned about the 1976 horror movie of the same name. If you haven’t seen it, Squirm graphically depicts what happens when “a storm causes some power lines to break and touch the ground, drawing millions of man-eating worms out of the earth.”
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Horrifying! But what really drew in Sherman was Squirm’s poster, a monstrosity featuring “a guy’s face infested with worms.”
Squirm Company/Amazon
Squirm’s influence on Sherman’s marketing alone should be obvious, as echoes of the film’s movie poster reverberate in her own comedy promotion.
“The production used hundreds of thousands of worms and like completely depleted the fishing industry of New England for the movie,” she wrote. Fact or exaggeration? Her point remains: “When you see the movie, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s a lot of worms.’”
All of this backstory was laying the groundwork for the comedian’s confession. “I also have used live worms for comedy,” she admitted. “And I would like to come clean and say, in Chicago, I used to run a show called Hell Trap Nightmare, and we had a bucket of hundreds of worms. I blindfolded a guy and put his hands in the bucket, and I made him guess what it was. He thought it was cream cheese. It was hundreds of live worms.”
Looking back, Sarah Sherman regrets what Sarah Squirm did for gross-out laughs. “Listen, I care about animals,” she insisted. “I care about living beings, and I want to love them, support all God’s creatures.”
Now she wants to atone for her sins. She does “believe that those worms perished,” despite the fact that Sherman “did return them to the soil.” That doesn’t change the grim reality: “Me and this movie have committed sins against living beings and I wanna repent for that.”
While she can’t reanimate the worms — and dear god, let’s hope she never tries — Sherman at least extended a heartfelt mea culpa on her Instagram: “to every worm i have ever hurt… i am sorry and i love you and i am learning and growing every day.”