Somewhere in Sarah Sherman’s apartment is a prosthetic eyeball that once peered out of her grandmother’s skull. When Ms. Sherman was a child, her grandmother liked to remove its iris and startle her with one milky white orb.
“It was terrifying,” Ms. Sherman recalled, but also “really funny.” She inherited the eyeball after her grandmother’s death and now wears it as a necklace on special occasions: “It’s like a little good-luck charm.”
It may not be entirely surprising that Ms. Sherman, 32, has become one of her generation’s most colorful practitioners of body horror, with a sensibility resembling David Cronenberg’s if he had been swallowed by a mulleted clown. A meal with her is a risky proposition: At a restaurant in Brooklyn last month, she brought up maggots, entrails, tentacles and rotting flesh by the time the Little Gem salads hit the table.
Later in the meal, she seemed to experience a flash of guilt. “You’re eating,” she said, apologetically.
She is in her fifth season as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” where she broke out playing the sorts of characters who have skin growths that are actually singing meatballs. (She also plays Colin Jost’s accountant.) Still, there are limits to how much visceral discomfort one can jam into a ratings-dependent network sketch comedy show.
There are no such restrictions on her debut comedy special, “Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh,” coming to HBO Max on Dec. 12. From the first toilet joke, which arrives right around the time the viewer presses “play,” Ms. Sherman enthusiastically repulses her audience while counting on her material to keep them in their seats.
“I like getting screams of terror and groans — I like playing with how far I can push people, and then bring them back with comedy,” she said.
Ms. Sherman grew up on Long Island, a “hairy Jewish girl” who loved to draw and was determined to become a comedian. Rubber chickens were scattered on the tables at her bat mitzvah, conveniently scheduled on April Fools’ Day.
She remembers feeling a lot of pressure to conform aesthetically. “All the girls were getting nose jobs when they were, like, 14, and it was kind of a shocking body trauma,” she said. She zagged, coming to school in hoop skirts borrowed from the theater department.
She studied theater at Northwestern University and lived in Chicago after graduating, performing stand-up that increasingly included visual elements she made herself. She illustrated posters for her variety show, “Helltrap Nightmare,” and played videos of magnified hair follicles that she asked audience members to locate on her body. The stage name Sarah Squirm served as something of a trigger warning.
Her work has long toyed with the way women’s bodies are scrutinized, modified and tamed, a subject she has continued to address on “Saturday Night Live.” In one “Weekend Update” segment, she begs the Victoria’s Secret fashion show to include more women with “Pangea nipples” — that is, those that converge in the middle to form a “nipple supercontinent.”
Her comedy heroes covered similar ground, albeit with fewer exposed organs. “Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller talk about the same stuff that I talk about — they were just funnier, and I just have images and props,” she said.
Ms. Sherman wanted those elements to be central to the special, a refined version of a stand-up show she has been touring for more than three years. She was reluctant to film it, she said, because she was having so much fun performing the material onstage.
The upside was getting to assemble a Murderers’ Row of oddball artists including John Waters, who appears in the special’s opening sequence, and the animator Rich Zim, who worked on “Gumby Adventures” and “Coraline.” For one roughly five-second gag, she recruited the prosthetic makeup artist Izzi Galindo to suspend a faux eyeball from her brow bone using a silicone tentacle.
She swung the eyeball around for half a day, Mr. Galindo recalled. When working with Ms. Sherman, he said, “I know I can make it as disgusting as possible, and she’s going to say, ‘Hell yeah.’”
At the restaurant in Brooklyn, Ms. Sherman was briefly diverted from her salad and fries to swipe excitedly through a folder of references on her phone: The Cabbage Patch Kid that she sent to the costume designer Ashley Dudek to guide her stage attire. The horror series “Tales From the Crypt,” which opens with a campy haunted house tour. The 1985 movie “Lifeforce,” which a review in The New York Times described as “hysterical vampire porn.”
When it became clear that her ideal filming location, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, would cut too deep into her budget, she sketched a set design that was a more corporeal take on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” with intestines surrounding the stage and teeth sticking out of the proscenium.
“We made, like, miles of guts,” said Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, a founder of the design collective Dots. He and his co-founders, Kimie Nishikawa and Andrew Moerdyk, are more often called upon to design sets for Broadway plays like “Oh, Mary!” and “An Enemy of the People.” They were excited by Ms. Sherman’s directive to ride the line “between gross and glam,” Mr. Orjuela-Laverde said.
They had about two months to design and fabricate the set before the special was filmed at the Bell House in Brooklyn in August. The final product includes giant foam fingers with rotten yellow nails, a bloodshot papier-mâché eyeball and a red velour curtain that is opened by tugging on a roll of toilet paper.
“We wanted this to feel very human-made,” Mr. Orjuela-Laverde said. “There are artists behind this, just painting and sculpting.”
The overall effect is a departure from the polished-looking specials that seem to arrive biweekly on streaming sites, with little more to look at than a mic, a stool and some tasteful lighting. “There are a lot of male stand-ups who are just onstage, hilarious, no bells and whistles, and I envy that,” Ms. Sherman said. “I believe that I can be my most hilarious if you just give me, like, a bunch of stuff.”
As her bowl of French fries dwindled, Ms. Sherman admitted to some anxiety about how the special would be received. Some viewers may expect the comparatively subdued version of her that they know from “S.N.L.” Will they be able to stomach this one?
She never really considered toning it down. “Even if people hate the special, I’m like, ‘This is what I’m really good at,’” she said. HBO seems to be preparing for the full spectrum of reactions: Before an advance screening in early December, workers handed out barf bags.
Ms. Sherman reached for her coat. She was headed to Times Square for a live show by Gwar, a heavy metal band that performs in alien costumes. She perked right back up as she explained that, in a bit of gory stagecraft, she was set to be decapitated before the crowd.
“I know I’m going to be hosed down in blood,” she said. “It’s like my dream come true.”
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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