The 8 Most Disgusting Things People Had to Do in the Name of Sketch Comedy
Hey, no one ever said being a sketch comic was going to be easy. If you wanted to sit around eating cheese and drinking Merlot all morning, you should have worked harder for that Young Sheldon audition. But now that you’re here, you might as well be prepared to do some gnarly things in the name of sketch comedy. Here are eight examples of the extremes you might be asked to go through to earn laughs the hard way…
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Catch Some Vomit
When you’re a kid comic on Nickelodeon, you know what you signed up for — at a minimum, it’s getting slimed on the regular. But there’s slime and then there’s slime. In “Tilt-A-Hurl,” a bit for tween sketch show All That, privileged beauty queens insist on standing beneath an attraction that’s guaranteed to make riders spew. All That and Nick know that kids love disgusting, so they make sure the riders eat plenty of corn before strapping in.
Sever an Artery
Okay, Dan Aykroyd didn’t actually sever an artery in the service of this sketch, but his hemorrhaging made people woozy all the same. “I had written the sketch for Walter Matthau, but it didn’t get picked the week he hosted,” remembers Al Franken in SNL oral history Live From New York. “So I had to convince Aykroyd to do it. We tried it once, but we didn’t have the hose working properly the first week, so we held it until we got control of the blood spurting. And it’s really a consummate Danny performance. I mean, it’s live TV, and just the timing of the spurts, it’s beautiful. I was so admiring of that performance. It was in the right hands.”
Smash a Hand in Dog Crap
Getting your ponytail caught in the undercarriage of a car isn’t disgusting, exactly, but how about the ponytailed neighbor in this I Think You Should Leave sketch? The nosy know-it-all is spared the hair snag, but gets his comeuppance when he “puts his hand in dog shit! Ha ha ha!” The sketch gets extra revulsion credit for making the nice lady do a Google image search for “disgusting diarrhea in bowl.”
Eat Boogers
This entire article could have been written using only Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! clips but let’s go with “My Dad Lets Me Eat My Boogs,” a catchy tune about a kid whose family doesn’t have food so, well, you know. Even Eric is repulsed.
Gulp Lotion
When adult film star Mia Khalifa stopped by to visit The Eric Andre Show, the host welcomed her by inviting her to swallow some lotion. To his credit, Andre goes first as he knows the importance of moisturizing one’s insides.
Insert a Vibrator in One’s Bottom
Those crazy dudes from Aunty Donna’s will do anything for a laugh, including a game of “hide the vibrator in your bum.” It’s a pretty fun contest — unless, of course, you lose the remote.
Endure Endless Farting
In this Inside Amy Schumer sketch, Amy finds herself inside Fart Park, a new community initiative that provides a judgment-free zone for public flatulence. The sketch originated when Schumer came up with a two-word premise: Fart Park. Sometimes, these things just write themselves.
Be Sarah Squirm
For pure, unadulterated disgusting, no one does it better than Sarah Sherman, aka Sarah Squirm. You won’t find many other videos on YouTube with closed captions for sound effects that read “intestines squelching.” “The Sarah Vaccine” was her response to COVID isolation, “a year of constantly being aware of what my lungs feel like, the paranoia of a smog of breath floating around your head carrying a contagious disease all around you, the claustrophobia of breathing hot stinkbreath into a mask, the image of a vaccine NEEDLE plunging into arms.”
One Letterboxd review raved: “i was really about to leave but the piss came in.” Sarah herself left a five-star review: “wow this was amazing and Sarah is so unbelievably hot...wonder who made it???”
