There’s a moment in every comedian’s career where the world finally catches up to what a few insiders already knew. For Sarah Sherman, that moment came the second she stepped onto the Saturday Night Live stage and did something nobody expected she didn’t tone it down. She didn’t play it safe. She showed up exactly as she was: bizarre, brilliant, and completely her own person. At 33 years old, Sarah Sherman has built a career that most comedians twice her age would envy, and she’s done it entirely on her own terms.
How Old Is Sarah Sherman?
Sarah Sherman age is 33. She was born on March 7, 1993, in Long Island, New York specifically in Great Neck, a suburb that she has referenced with a kind of amused self-awareness in interviews. She grew up, went to high school at William A. Shine Great Neck South High School, headed off to Northwestern University, and eventually found her way into the weird, wonderful corners of the American comedy underground. As of 2026, she stands at 33 years old, thriving at what most people would consider the absolute peak creative years of a comedian’s life.
What’s striking about her age is the contrast it creates. When you watch her perform crawling across a stage, wearing outlandish vintage suits, committing fully to something grotesque and hilarious you might assume she’s been doing this for decades. The confidence reads that way. But she’s still in her early thirties, and the best of her career is almost certainly still ahead.
Growing Up in Great Neck: The Foundation of a Future Comedian
Long Island in the early 2000s wasn’t exactly a breeding ground for avant-garde body horror comedy. Yet somehow, Sarah Sherman absorbed something from that environment that fueled everything she would later create. She has described herself as always knowing she wanted to be a comedian not as a passing childhood dream, but as a deep, settled certainty. She got her first open mic experience at just 16 years old, performing at The Hog Pit in New York City. That’s not normal. Most teenagers at 16 are figuring out what to wear to school. Sarah was already taking the stage.
She attended Northwestern University, where she studied theater and graduated in 2014. Interestingly, she developed an interest in stand-up after failing to make the improv team there. That rejection, rather than discouraging her, pushed her toward something far more original. Instead of chasing the traditional improv-to-SNL pipeline that so many comedians follow, she carved out something entirely her own and that detour made all the difference.
The Chicago Years: Building Something Weird and Wonderful
After graduating, Sherman stayed in Chicago rather than rushing to Los Angeles or New York like so many of her peers. That decision shaped her artistically in ways that still show up in every sketch she writes. She launched a monthly variety show called Helltrap Nightmare, which became something of a cult phenomenon in the Chicago underground comedy scene. She performed between sets of noise musicians, shared bills with bands whose names can’t be repeated in polite company, and developed a signature style that blended visual comedy, body horror, and earnest sincerity in equal measure.
She also befriended comedian Megan Stalter during this period another performer who would go on to significant recognition and the two formed part of a creative community that was doing genuinely experimental work far outside the mainstream. Furthermore, Sherman began performing under her stage name “Sarah Squirm” during these years, a nickname that originated in high school and perfectly captured the physical, squirming, uncomfortable-but-hilarious energy she brought to every performance.
Television Beginnings and the Eric André Connection
Sherman made her television debut in 2018 in an Adult Swim infomercial called Flayaway a characteristically strange entry point into the industry. The following year, she opened for Eric André on his Legalize Everything national tour, which brought her to much larger audiences than the basement shows she had been playing. She also wrote for The Eric Andre Show, Three Busy Debras, and Netflix’s Magic for Humans, building her credentials as both a performer and a writer simultaneously.
These weren’t just resume checkboxes. Each project pushed her style further and gave her more tools to work with. By the time SNL came calling, she wasn’t a raw talent who needed polish. She was a fully formed comedic voice who simply needed a bigger platform.
Sarah Sherman on SNL: A Historic Run
In October 2021, at 28 years old, Sarah Sherman joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as a featured player in its 47th season. Her arrival was immediately noticed not just by audiences, but by critics who had never quite seen anything like her on the show’s stage. Her sketches were visually inventive, physically committed, and genuinely surprising in ways that SNL hadn’t produced in years.
Promoted to Repertory Status
By October 2023, still just 30 at the time, she earned promotion to repertory status the full cast tier that signals the show’s long-term investment in a performer. That promotion meant she was no longer an experiment. She was a cornerstone. Moreover, one of her collaborations with SNL writer Dan Bulla, a sketch called Shrimp Tower starring host Josh Brolin, earned a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Production Design for a Variety or Reality Series. At an age when many comedians are still doing open mics, Sarah Sherman was collecting Emmy wins.
The Colin Jost Roasts
Among her most beloved recurring contributions to SNL are her “Weekend Update” appearances where she roasts co-anchor Colin Jost with gleeful, merciless creativity. These bits, which she constructs as elaborate comedic ambushes, have become appointment television for fans of the show. She doesn’t just tell jokes at Jost’s expense she builds entire fictional universes around his humiliation, complete with fake agents, fake sons, and deeply absurd conspiracy theories. The audience never quite knows where it’s going, and that unpredictability is precisely what makes it work.
Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh
In December 2025, Sherman released her debut stand-up special on HBO, titled Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh. The special features legendary filmmaker John Waters and is best described as a psychedelic body horror circus one that critics praised for its audacity and originality. At 32 when it was filmed, she delivered a special that felt like the culmination of everything she had been building since those Chicago basement shows. Grotesque visuals, stop-motion animation, an unbelievably high poop joke count, and underneath it all, a genuine point of view about the experience of existing in a body in the modern world.
Personal Life: Grounded Behind the Chaos
Off stage, Sarah Sherman leads a life that is considerably more grounded than her on-stage persona might suggest. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, SNL writer Dan Licata. She has one younger brother. She has spoken openly about being in dream analysis a practice she traces back to watching David Lynch films as a teenager and cites influences ranging from Seinfeld and The Golden Girls to Norm Macdonald and Jerry Lewis. She is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and has been politically engaged throughout her career, endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2020 and later supporting local New York City candidates.
What 33 Looks Like When You’re Sarah Sherman
There’s a version of a 33-year-old comedian’s career that looks cautious and calculated carefully cultivated, brand-safe, optimized for the widest possible audience. Sarah Sherman’s career looks nothing like that. At 33, she has an HBO special, an Emmy, a full cast position on the longest-running sketch show in American television history, and a comedic identity so distinctive that critics describe her as a once-in-a-generation presence. She got here by refusing every shortcut and committing completely to the strange, specific, deeply personal vision she has carried since she was a teenager performing at open mics in New York City.
Sarah Sherman’s age is just a number but what she has packed into those 33 years is anything but ordinary. She is proof that the most interesting careers are rarely the ones that follow the expected path, and that the detours, the basement shows, the failed improv auditions, and the noise music sets can sometimes lead somewhere far more extraordinary than the straight line ever would have.
