"Adulate Me. Adulate Me.": The Wonderfully Unhinged Story of Sarah Sherman Meeting Paul McCartney at SNL

There are celebrity encounters, and then there are celebrity encounters. Most of the former involve a polite handshake, a photo, and a story that gets told at dinner parties for a few years before fading into the general catalogue of things that once happened. Very few enter the permanent record of genuinely perfect human moments. The story of Sarah Sherman and Paul McCartney — which Sherman shared in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE Magazine on May 30, 2026, at the 5th Annual Las Culturistas Culture Awards in Los Angeles — is definitively the latter. It involves a mullet, a hair pull, a profession of undying love, an apology for excessive complimenting, and a response from an 84-year-old legend that is so perfectly in character, so effortlessly self-aware, and so completely unanticipated that it has already entered the short but distinguished canon of the funniest things a rock star has ever said backstage at Studio 8H.

The story begins, as the best SNL stories do, with a bit.

The Setup: A Mullet, a Legend, and a Bit That Got Out of Hand

Sarah Sherman joined Saturday Night Live as a featured player in 2021, was promoted to the repertory cast in October 2023, and has spent five seasons building a reputation as one of the most genuinely strange and delightfully committed performers the show has seen in years. If you have watched SNL in the past few seasons, you know the energy: maximalist, absurdist, fiercely intelligent beneath its deliberately chaotic surface, and — perhaps most relevantly to this story — equipped with a mullet so distinctive it has taken on its own cultural life.

At some point during Season 51, Sherman did a bit on the show about her mullet. The gag was built around the observation that her signature haircut bears an uncanny resemblance to the one Paul McCartney wore during his Wings era in the 1970s — the period when the former Beatle fronted one of the most commercially successful bands in rock history and did so with the kind of feathered, flowing mullet that, in 2026, reads simultaneously as period-specific and as exactly the hair a 33-year-old comedy weirdo might choose to wear on a sketch comedy show.

The bit landed. The audience recognised it. And somewhere, presumably, Paul McCartney either heard about it or someone made sure he heard about it, because when McCartney arrived at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on May 16, 2026 — as the musical guest for the Season 51 finale of SNL, hosted by Will Ferrell — he came prepared to do something about the mullet situation.

The Encounter: A Hair Pull and a Question

The Season 51 finale with Will Ferrell as host and Paul McCartney as musical guest was already a significant television event by any measure. Will Ferrell is one of the most beloved hosts in the show's history. Paul McCartney, who turned 84 in June 2026, remains one of the most universally recognised and admired musicians alive — a former Beatle, a solo artist, a member of Wings, a composer, a performer who has been doing this since before most of his audience's parents were born and who still performs three-hour concerts for stadium audiences without an evident desire to slow down. His appearance on SNL as musical guest was the kind of booking that makes an already significant finale genuinely historic.

And then the show ended, the credits rolled, and Paul McCartney walked up to Sarah Sherman and pulled her mullet.

"So, basically I was doing a bit talking about how I have his mullet from his Wings era," Sherman explained to PEOPLE's reporter at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards, in what has already been described by everyone who has read it as one of the most enjoyable celebrity anecdote recaps in recent memory. "And so he came up to me after the show and he pulled up my mullet and he was like, 'Is it real or is it a wig?'"

That sentence alone — the image of Paul McCartney, one of the most famous human beings in the history of popular music, physically grasping the mullet of a 33-year-old SNL cast member he has just met and asking whether it is authentic — is remarkable enough to carry a story. It reveals something endearing and completely consistent with everything anyone has ever observed about McCartney: that he is curious, physically comfortable, and entirely unencumbered by the kind of precious distance that might lead a different legend to acknowledge a joke about his hair from across a room rather than investigating it personally and directly.

But then Sherman answered his question. And then something even better happened.

The Declaration, the Apology, and the Line for the Ages

"And I said, 'It's real, Paul,'" Sherman recalled, with the precision of someone who has been replaying this conversation in her head approximately eleven thousand times since it happened. "And then, I was like, 'Paul McCartney, I love you, you're amazing. Like, McCartney II is my favorite album ever, and "Temporary Secretary" is my favorite song.'"

Let us pause briefly here to appreciate the specificity of the fandom being declared. Sherman did not say she loved The Beatles, or "Hey Jude," or "Let It Be" — all of which would have been true, sincere, and entirely expected from any person who grew up listening to music. She told Paul McCartney that McCartney II is her favourite album and "Temporary Secretary" is her favourite song.

McCartney II, released in 1980, is one of the more unusual records in Paul McCartney's discography. His third solo studio album, it was recorded entirely by McCartney himself — playing every instrument, engineering the sessions, producing the record in solo — and it sits considerably outside the melodic pop mainstream that defined his most commercially successful work. It is an experimental, synth-driven, deliberately eccentric album that sounds nothing like Wings and very little like anything else McCartney made before or since. It is beloved by a specific and devoted subset of McCartney fans who prize it precisely because it represents him at his most uninhibited and self-directed — making music for himself, with no commercial pressure, with no collaborators to satisfy, in what amounted to a forty-eight-hour burst of creative excess.

"Temporary Secretary," the album's lead single, is perhaps the purest expression of what makes McCartney II so strange and so wonderful. Built around a driving electronic beat, a sequencer pattern that sounds like it was borrowed from a German avant-garde record, and lyrics about attempting to hire a secretary through an employment agency, it is not a song that was expected to define anyone's musical taste. And yet here is Sarah Sherman, backstage at Studio 8H, telling Paul McCartney to his face that it is her favourite song he has ever recorded.

McCartney's reported reaction to the album and song declaration has not been described in detail — but what happened next certainly has, because what Sherman said after declaring her love for McCartney II is where this story produces its immortal moment.

"And then I was like, 'I'm sorry I'm complimenting you so much.'"

She apologised. To Paul McCartney. For complimenting him excessively. And Paul McCartney replied.

"I love adulation. Adulate me. Adulate me."

Four words, said twice. A complete philosophy. An instruction. A man who has been one of the most famous people on earth for over sixty years, who has received more compliments from more people than almost any human being who has ever lived, responding to an apology for excessive complimenting with the single most perfect and self-aware possible response.

He did not deflect. He did not perform false modesty. He did not say anything designed to make Sherman feel less self-conscious. He leaned into it completely, with evident delight, and told her to keep going.

"Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome," Sherman told PEOPLE, in a summary that may slightly undersell the situation.

Why This Story Has Resonated So Widely

The reason this story — which Sherman had previously shared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! before giving PEOPLE the exclusive full account at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards — has spread as quickly and as warmly as it has is that it contains several things simultaneously that are genuinely rare in celebrity encounter stories.

It is funny. Not "celebrity said something charming" funny, but actually, structurally, specifically funny — the kind of funny that only works because every element is exactly right. The mullet. The physical hair inspection. The apology for over-complimenting. The four-word response.

It is revealing of Paul McCartney in a way that is consistent with everything his long-time fans know about him. McCartney at 84 is not a relic performing nostalgia. He is a person still making music, still curious about other people's hair, still capable of producing a perfectly timed comic response in a backstage encounter at a television studio. The "adulate me" line is not the response of someone who has become defended or performatively humble about their fame. It is the response of someone who has been famous for so long that they have arrived, somewhere around the far side of the fame experience, at a kind of serene comfort with it — and who can laugh at that comfort without diminishing either the fame or the person expressing admiration for it.

It is also revealing about Sherman, whose genuine fandom for McCartney II specifically — rather than the more obvious catalogue choices — says something real about her taste and her sensibility. Sherman's whole public persona is built on the commitment to the specific, the unexpected, the slightly uncomfortable, the thing that makes the room unsure whether to laugh or wince. Of course she loves McCartney II. Of course "Temporary Secretary" is her favourite song. Of course she apologised for over-complimenting a Beatle and received in return a two-word instruction to continue.

The Season 51 Finale: What the Night Looked Like

For the record, the evening on which this encounter occurred — the SNL Season 51 finale on May 16, 2026, hosted by Will Ferrell with Paul McCartney as musical guest — was already a memorable night for reasons beyond the backstage conversation. Will Ferrell's SNL hosting record has been described as having a shaky history by reviewers, and the Season 51 finale was, by most accounts, a characteristically uneven finale episode — with some celebrated moments including Paul McCartney's appearance in a "Mechanics" sketch and a concert during the goodnights that featured Will Ferrell joining McCartney with a cowbell for a version of "Help!" — a moment that has since been described by NBC as a rarely seen combination of musical history and the show's own recurring cowbell comedy legacy.

Sarah Sherman had her own moment in the episode's Weekend Update segment, returning to the anchor desk in a capacity that reviewers noted felt more relaxed and natural than her costumed bits had been in recent weeks. By the time the goodnights rolled and McCartney walked over to inspect her hair, both performers had already had a memorable night by any measure.

The post-season Instagram dump from SNL, published on May 18, included behind-the-scenes footage from the finale — further cementing the episode's status as one of the more culturally eventful season finales in recent memory, even by the uneven standards of SNL finales.

The Las Culturistas Culture Awards Moment

Sherman gave the PEOPLE Magazine exclusive account at the 5th Annual Las Culturistas Culture Awards, held at the United Theater in Los Angeles on May 30, 2026. Las Culturistas is the podcast hosted by comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang — the latter being Sherman's SNL colleague — and its annual Culture Awards have become a fixture in the comedy world's cultural calendar, celebrating the things its community has found most compelling, most strange, and most worthy of intense engagement over the past year.

It is the precisely right venue for a story about loving McCartney II and "Temporary Secretary." Both the story and the setting are products of the same cultural ecosystem: comedy people who take their obsessions seriously, celebrate the specific over the general, and understand that the most interesting version of fandom is the one that goes sideways.

Sherman, who has been with SNL since 2021 and released her HBO Max stand-up special Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh in late 2025, has been building a profile as someone whose comedy asks audiences to trust her into genuinely uncomfortable places. The Paul McCartney story is — if you squint at it — a version of that same move. She trusted the discomfort of apologising for over-complimenting an 84-year-old rock legend to his face, and she was rewarded with the best possible outcome: a line she will be telling for the rest of her life, and now all of us will be repeating.

Adulate me. Adulate me.

Paul McCartney has been giving people material since 1963. He is still at it.

Sources

PEOPLE Magazine / AOL — Sarah Sherman Shares Paul McCartney's Hilarious Response to Her Confessing She's a Huge Fan of His (Exclusive): https://www.aol.com/articles/sarah-sherman-shares-paul-mccartneys-020000695.html

Yahoo News UK — Sarah Sherman Shares Paul McCartney's Hilarious Response to Her Confessing She's a Huge Fan of His: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/sarah-sherman-shares-paul-mccartneys-020000261.html

The News (Pakistan) — Sarah Sherman reveals Paul McCartney's unexpected question about her hairstyle: https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1406678-sarah-sherman-reveals-paul-mccartneys-unexpected-question-about-her-hairstyle

Blood's SNL Reviews — May 16, 2026 – Will Ferrell / Paul McCartney (S51 E20): https://bloodsnlreviews.com/2026/05/17/may-16-2026-will-ferrell-paul-mccartney-s51-e20/

NBC Insider — Watch Will Ferrell Back Paul McCartney with More Cowbell on "Help!" After SNL Goodnights: https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/will-ferrell-cowbell-paul-mccartney-help-snl-goodnights-performance

Jimmy Kimmel Live — Sarah Sherman on Paul McCartney touching her hair and doing a sketch with Will Ferrell (Facebook video): https://www.facebook.com/JimmyKimmelLive/videos/sarah-sherman-on-paul-mccartney-touching-her-hair-and-doing-a-sketch-with-will-f/1528228282000161/

YouTube / Jimmy Kimmel Live — Sarah Sherman on SNL with Paul McCartney & Will Ferrell and Her Love of Making People Uncomfortable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzNVSo6JdFQ