“I’m very sensitive. I’m afraid of seeing the video,” Sarah Sherman tells me in the days after federal agents killed a second protester in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sherman, a stand-up comedian whose over-the-top body horror under the stage name Sarah Squirm has earned her a spot in the cast of Saturday Night Live (SNL) and, recently, her own HBO special, has no interest in seeing a real-life snuff film.

When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed a few months prior, friends had casually sent Sherman links to the footage. “They were like, ‘Did you see the video?’ because, you know, I like gore. And I was like, ‘You’ve gotten me all wrong.’” Sherman, wearing a hat emblazoned with the logo of the death metal band Cannibal Corpse, shakes her head. “I make sparkly candy cartoon gore. It’s funny because it’s not real.”

I recall the last time I felt the need to avert my eyes from a moving image. It was a few days earlier, at home, streaming Sherman’s stand-up special Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh, which ends with an unrelenting montage of gross-out visuals designed for maximum psychic confrontation with the human terror of embodiment.