For one night only during Memorial Day weekend, Sherman’s Showcase, the comedy television series created by Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle, will adapt to a live format, produced by Get Lifted—the John Legend-led production company.

Per a description of the series from the time it aired last in 2022, it features “sketches, dancers, fake commercials, movie trailers, cultural nostalgia, the Funk Monster, A-list guest stars and original songs that definitely climbed the fictional charts. Each episode is hosted by Sherman McDaniels as he takes viewers through time, via music and comedy drawn from the 50-year library of a legendary (but fictional) musical variety show.”

Translating the series to a live format

“Working with John Legend, specifically, I mean, he just set such a high bar for live performance,” Salahuddin told Blavity’s Shadow and Act in a recent interview. “It’s almost like if, you know, we worked on Jimmy Fallon’s live show, we had Lorne Michaels, who was kind of like the guru, who would kind of come in and move things around and say, ‘Do it this way, that way.’ With this show, that’s John Legend. I mean, he is our guru. He’s the guy who looks at things [and says], ‘Hey, what about this, what about that?’ He encourages us to try things. This guy’s definitely put in his 10,000 hours on stage. So for us, it’s just great having the support of somebody who knows what excellence looks like in front of a live audience.”

It’s been roughly six years since the song “Drop It Low for Jesus” appeared on Sherman’s Showcase as a sketch. It has since become a viral and lasting cultural moment, but Salahuddin says he always believed they had it in them to achieve that level of success.

Why Salahuddin believes “Drop It Low for Jesus” remains so culturally relevant

“I always felt like that’s something that we would have in us, because I know the work we put in,” he said. “We kind of started, you know, taking our side job money and buying costumes and putting sketch comedy shows up all around Los Angeles, and slowly but surely figured out a way to do a web show, and slowly but surely finally got hired to write for TV.”

@amcplus Keep the Lord in mind this Sunday.#ShermansShowcase premieres this Wed on @IFC and AMC+. #dropitlowforjesus #dropitlow #jesus ♬ original sound – AMC+

Salahuddin added, “So when we had an opportunity to do our own show, I just knew that the work ethic was there for something good to happen. I’m really happy that that was the thing that resonated, though, because it came from such a cool place.”

He credits his sister Zuri, who also sings “Drop It Low for Jesus,” for the hit that has since become a meme and spread widely across social and digital media.

“The way our show works is, we’ll take good ideas from anywhere. You know, a good idea is a good idea, and so once she brought that one in, we were like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a hit.’ It just felt good. I think, to our credit, it shows that we were set up for that to work because of our education and our training, and spending years and years just always seeking out the funniest things—things that were really funny in a way you didn’t see everywhere else.”

Salahuddin says, from observing how comedy spreads online, the “Drop It Low for Jesus” sketch tapped into something that hadn’t previously existed.

“It taps into our current culture, where people are definitely pushing all types of boundaries nowadays, and that feels like a really boundary-pushing song,” he said.

When and where is the live adaptation of ‘Sherman’s Showcase’?

With their first live segment of Sherman’s Showcase taking place in Sin City this Memorial Day weekend, Salahuddin says the goal is to leave the audience wanting more.

“You want to leave things a little bit shorter than you could so that the audience is left feeling a sense that they just got to have more of it,” he concluded.

Sherman’s Showcase Live will take place on Friday, May 23, at the House of Blues in the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, where Bashir Salahuddin and longtime collaborator and co-creator of the series, Diallo Riddle, will be joined in an epic event that merges music, comedy, and performances by a few familiar faces.