A Comedian’s Extreme Performance

When Sherman took the stage, it was clear this wouldn’t be a typical comedy show. She stormed on, raising both middle fingers and immediately challenged the audience with a blunt, “Shut up! Fuck you!” Her outfit – a polka-dot shirt, red tie, rainbow pants, and a scraggly mullet – hinted at the performance to come.

At thirty-two, Sherman delivered a set almost entirely focused on the human body, specifically her own. She didn’t shy away from detail. Actually,she leaned into it. She spent a long time complaining, with deliberately unpleasant sound effects, about her gym clothes getting “sucked into” her body. She talked openly about vaginal discharge and excessive sweating, pointing out “wasabi stains” on her shirt and underwear that “look like [her] pussy sneezed in it.”

Urine and feces were also frequent topics.For sherman, she explained, “pissing and shitting isn’t a binary, it’s a fucking spectrum…my piss is so thick and my shit is so runny, no matter what I’m doing in the bathroom, honey, I’m going to number 1.5, hey!” She’d pause, then ask, “What kind of comedy show did you think you were seeing tonight?” The audience responded with a mix of groans and laughter.

Body hair also got its moment. Her pubic hair, she claimed, was thick enough to weave a “wicker goddam basket,” and her nipple hair was “so long I could tie my tits together to get amazing cleavage.”

The show culminated in a PowerPoint video combining real footage and claymation. It showed Sherman nude, with exaggerated features: enormous pubic hair, armpit hair like kudzu, and labia made of prosthetics dangling almost to her feet. “I can’t go to the beach,” she said,”my lips are so long and distended and disgusting,like knock around between my knees like the pendulum on a grandfather clock.” She compared her labia to a turkey’s wattle, an open-faced Reuben, and the jowls of an old English mastiff, “and just as slobbery.”