With Sarah Sherman's "Meatballs" sketch, SNL showed it can still takes chances

Paste Magazine

"When SNL hired Sarah Sherman, fans of the comic’s 'Sarah Squirm' online persona were rightly worried that Sherman’s singular talent for deliberately offputting, semi-experimental absurdist comedy would be flattened to fit SNL’s middlebrow needs," says Dennis Perkins. "And while Sherman’s gotten some squirm onto the airwaves (her 'Update' pieces taunting Colin Jost with career-ending scandal are bracingly bold), this is the first time I get the sense Sherman just wasn’t taking no for an answer, dammit. Since time-honored tradition at SNL is to keep the writers’ individual contributions consigned to the too-fast credit roll, I don’t know, as of review-time, if Sherman wrote this pre-taped bit about her blushing third-date paramour (alongside an ever-game Chris Redd) revealing that she’s covered in singing, barfing, cheese-eating meatball-like growths. But I’m going to go ahead and glance over that sentence again and assume that she did. I spent the first half of this thing thinking, 'This is a Michael O’Donoghue sketch,' because I’m old and have fond memories of Saturday Night Live’s boundary-pushing writer Mr. Mike. But then it dawned on me that this is a Sarah Sherman sketch, letting a bananas, potentially audience-turning conceit play out into a literal crescendo of mutant comic weirdness."

ALSO:

• SNL was making use of Sarah Sherman's particular talents while also indulging in its glorious tradition of achieving new heights through go-for-broke absurdity
• It's annoying when SNL becomes self-referential, like Chloe Fineman and her Inventing Anna sketch