Sarah Squirm Reacts to Viral ‘Saturday Night Live’ Take That Hot Women Don’t Get Cast

According to the apparent Saturday Night Live casting guidelines, Sarah Squirm is officially not hot — Lorne Michaels better hope that her dad never finds out. 

Eleven days ago, popular Tiktoker Jahelis posted a near-four minute video captioned, “Hoepfulky (sic) at least one person out there understands what I’m trying to say” in which she claimed that Saturday Night Live refuses to hire “hot” women due to patriarchal standards in media that demand that woman comedians must be more funny than they are attractive in order to be accepted by a male audience. While Jahelis claims that her now-viral rant about the unattractiveness of various SNL cast members (in her evaluation) wasn’t meant to tear down the successful women who failed Jahelis’ fuckability test but to rather highlight misogynistic double standards in entertainment, it was hard not to read the post as a dig on the appearances of the many dozens of talented women who have appeared on SNL in the last 48 seasons, and one such artist finally offered her own response.

The online SNL fandom may have spent this past weekend railing against Jahelis’ insulting assessment of their favorite female comedians’ looks, but Sarah Sherman, better known as “that extremely colorful and chaotic cast member who tortures Colin Jost” or simply “Sarah Squirm,” bypassed the anger stage of grief and skipped straight to acceptance.

Many of the SNL fans who took offense to Jahelis' video pointed out the irony (or hypocrisy) of her criticizing the casting process for being superficial when she, herself, couldn't be bothered to learn Heidi Gardner's name before openly trashing her appearance. In the video, Jahelis says that Gardner is “not that pretty,” saying that “it always makes me laugh” when Gardner’s character in a sketch is written to be an attractive woman.

“What is the point of going online and negging Heidi Gardner like you’re a frat bro dishing out 5s & 6s on Hot or Not Dot Com,” one user questioned on Twitter, while another said of Jahelis' confusing pretense, “I like when someone makes a video about a person, has to look up a photo of that person, and still claims they don’t know that person’s name.”

Many, many more SNL fans whose hearts were presumably in the right place offered dozens of names of SNL cast members who they consider to be “hot women” without considering that, maybe, the right response to an insultingly superficial denigration of women in comedy shouldn’t be countered with an equally superficial endorsement. Similarly, other SNL defenders attacked Jahelis’ own appearance in jokes and roasts. But Squirm’s response to the video stands out as mature and just mocking enough to maybe make Jahelis reconsider the way she speaks about successful women online and let the rest of us laugh off the massively unneeded take.

As one of the top commenters said under the TikTok, “It’s ok not to verbalize every thought.”