Sasheer Zamata Talks Her New Special, and the Benefits of Being a Witchy Woman (Exclusive)

Get to know the real Sasheer Zamata — warts and all. The comedian wants you to know her better, and she certainly achieves her goal with her second comedy special, Sasheer Zamata: The First Woman, which is streaming on YouTube now. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture, the Saturday Night Live alum spoke at length about her new show, including why its title is so thematically significant. 

“I think you’ll understand more once you watch the special, but I wanted to give it a name that kind of encompassed the themes in the special, which are very woman-forward,” she said when asked about the show’s title. “I talk about myself as a woman as a Black woman, and I talk about women’s anatomy,” Zamata added. “I talk about women’s history in America, so there’s a lot of themes in there that connect, and I felt like The First Woman really encapsulated that.”

Another important, perhaps unexpected, theme of the show is the power of witches. They’re mentioned so frequently throughout The First Woman that they become a running joke. Zamata can’t help but make even the seemingly most tenuous of connections relevant to the broom-riding enchantresses as a kind of tribute to their innate awesomeness.

“I think I’ve just been reading up on witches,” she said. “I think we’re in a time where people are feeling very witchy or doing little everyday magic things in their own life. And kind of started seeing a lot of themes in the reading.”

“I was doing that, which is, we’re kind of just like unruly women or women who couldn’t be tamed or people in general. And I wanted to talk about it in the show because I didn’t want it, witch, to be like a dirty word or like a bad connotation and kind of give some light to the history of how we even got to our perception of what a witch is and why, why we might think about that and why maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Zamata added. “I hope people watch the special and come away with it with a different idea of witchery and kind of look forward to the magic as opposed to being scared of it.”

When people watch The First Woman, Zamata wants them to see not only her opinions on everything from body positivity to women’s rights to witches but also to witness someone with a greatly evolved sense of self. With, of course, a hilarious punchline.

“I want people to laugh, one. It’s a standup special,” Zamata said. “But I also want people to learn more about me. This is the second special I have released. The first one I put out was in 2017, and it was like five years later, and the world has changed a bunch. I’ve changed a bunch, and I hope people see this and get more of an idea of what my voice is today.”

The First Woman is available to stream on YouTube. Sasheer will next be seen alongside Kathryn Hahn in Agatha: Coven of Chaos, Marvel’s upcoming WandaVision spinoff series for Disney+, and previously appeared in Hulu’s WOKE.