This year, Sarah Sherman AKA Sarah Squirm has become an SNL darling for a plethora of reasons.
Her snarky and playful banter with Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost, wherein she often accuses him of antisemitism, is a beloved recurring bit with the audience. Audiences also crave digital sketches from “Please Don’t Destroy,” which Sarah often appears in. And who could forget the bombastic characters she’s played this season, including horror film antagonist Chucky and the Six Flags Guy?!
But to round out all of these lovable qualities is, of course, Sarah’s kooky and maximalist fashion sense both on the show and off, which she herself has described as looking like “Chucky went to Sarah Lawrence.”
Well, thanks to a recent interview, we now know how Sarah developed her iconic fashion choices — and the answer is extremely Jewish.
“Sherman grew up watching Jewish sartorial maven Fran Drescher do it up on ‘The Nanny,'” Nylon reporter Layla Halabin writes. “Armed with a dream and an aunt willing to drive her to Filene’s Basement, Sherman would scour the store to find something loud and tacky to add to her wardrobe.”
“And I just loved it, it was fun to wear a hoop skirt to school for attention,” Sherman added. “It was a stunt, basically.”
Quite frankly, we’re schvitzing over the idea of a Fran Fine and Sarah Squirm collaboration. If anyone reading this can make that happen, please do.
In the interview, Sherman also told Halabin about “coming of age amongst the vicious body standards at the epicenter of Jewish Long Island.”
“Growing up on Long Island where there’s 13-year-old girls getting nose jobs and doing laser hair removal, and that being kind of metabolized as normal — which is like, do whatever you want to do, I don’t care, but we can all agree, it’s totally invasive, painful, brutal procedures,” Sarah mentioned. “I got my first bikini wax when I was f*cking 12 or whatever because I had pubes before anyone else on the swim team.”
When you combine these two pieces of information — the flamboyant outfits of Fran Drescher and the body horror of growing up on Long Island — the very Jewish comedy of Sarah Sherman makes total sense.
And we are absolutely dying to see more of it on SNL next season.
