Five months ago Sarah Cooper was trying to make it as a stand-up comedian. Now her Trump lip-synch videos have had millions of views – and attracted the attention of the Democrats. Could she be their secret weapon in November?
A new champion has emerged from the ranks of America's comedians. Famous comics rave about her videos. "I'm a big fan," said Jimmy Fallon, when she appeared on The Tonight Show recently. "Man, you're making me laugh."
Her name is Sarah Cooper and she is being hailed, all over America, as the Trump slayer: the satirist who skewered the president.
Trump once seemed an easy target, but he has proved notoriously hard to pin down. There was the hair, the bluster, the rambling monologues about windmills: it looked like a gift to comedy. The problem was, you couldn't beat the original. Alec Baldwin impersonated him on Saturday Night Live; Stephen Colbert assailed him with nightly monologues. It made Trump cross, but none of it seemed to land.
Now here is Cooper. I can hear her banging around a studio in Brooklyn, pretending to be The Donald. She emerges from behind a screen wearing a red trouser suit, trailed by a photographer. Loud music is playing and we're wearing masks, which makes communication difficult. "Are you the writer?" she asks, miming, with a broad gesture, the act of scribbling on a notepad. I pull an actual notepad from behind my back and wave it about manically and she laughs.
Do you really think she could bring down Trump, I ask the photographer, an American named Kareem Black, as he sets up the next shot. He nods. "There is a line of comedians whose satire was very cutting and became permanent," he says. Chevy Chase nailed Gerald Ford. Tina Fey did for the vice-presidential hopes of Sarah Palin. Cooper is part of that tradition, he says. Hers is "really one of the most brutal takedowns".
Cooper, 42, is a former employee of Google and the author of two satirical books about corporate etiquette. One night in April, she posted a video of herself lip-synching to a Trump address. The audio was Trump suggesting that disinfectant, injected into the body, might cure the coronavirus. Cooper crouched in her kitchen, clutching a bottle of bleach. She was not quite impersonating him, for when the president speaks his face is often blank. Baldwin impersonates him like that: his face rigid. But Cooper filled in the blank. She looked by turns uncertain and absolutely convinced of the brilliance of what she was saying. Her eyes darted about as if grasping for the next thought.
How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p
— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020
The effect was strangely clarifying. For years people had been saying that no one else could say the things that President Trump says and get away with it. In Cooper's videos, someone else was saying it, and that person was a young black woman. She didn't dress up as Trump. She was just herself. Jerry Seinfeld, who prides himself on an almost scientific approach to joke-making, told The New York Times, "The reason this is funny is because she doesn't think she's being funny."
Cooper shot the bleach video in a hurry, worrying all the time that "it was stupid", she says, when we sit down after the shoot. We perch at the end of a table, talking through our masks while the crew pack up. "I was just earnestly trying to be a person suggesting these crazy things as honestly as I could do," she says. "I think it works because I'm a low-power, low-status person who's making fun of someone who is powerful."
I nod and then, because I'm wearing a mask, feel obliged to clarify. I'm not saying you are low status, I say.
"No, but it's true, especially when I first started. I was very low-power, and making fun of someone who's powerful." Trump "doesn't have a lot of regard for women and he doesn't have a lot of regard for black women", she continues. Cooper, who was born in Jamaica, also feels that the president "doesn't have a lot of regard for immigrants, even though his wife is an immigrant".
The reason people rave about her videos has something to do with this, she thinks. "They hate him so much and they know he must hate this," she says. "There's just something so satisfying about someone he disdains one-upping him."
After the disinfectant video cleaned up online, Cooper began posting regular clips of herself lip-synching snatches of Trump addressing the nation. Tens of millions of people began watching them. "Donald Trump likes to talk about ratings," the broadcaster Dan Rather said on Twitter. "But will anybody tell him that more people seem to be watching [Sarah Cooper] than [Trump ally and Fox News pundit Sean] Hannity?"
I expect Joe Biden's team have called? I'm half-joking, but she nods.
"Yeah. It looks like I will be doing something for the convention," she says.
She has also been asked to host Jimmy Kimmel's talk show while he is on holiday. "Which is crazy," she says. At the beginning of this year, Cooper was trying to make it as a stand-up comedian, showing up to open-mic nights. "I started the year… hoping I would get a set on a late-night show. Now I'm hosting."
Cooper came to America when she was 3 with the help of her grandmother, who died recently at the age of 99 and had moved from Jamaica to Washington DC to work as a housekeeper. "She was full Chinese, but she had a Jamaican accent," says Cooper. "She sponsored all of us."
Now, "My dad is really scared that Trump is going to deport us because of my videos." They're all American citizens. "I mean, I don't think he can do that, but there are lots of things I didn't think he could do that he's done. At least we would get deported to Jamaica," she says, laughing. "There are worse places to be deported to, I guess."
Her father worked as an engineer for DC's transport agency; her mother worked for a healthcare firm. During the summer holidays she would help her mother hand out forms. "She'd be like, 'Everyone has to fill out their health benefits.' I would hand out the health benefits forms," she says. "I enjoyed it."
She was the youngest of four. One of her older sisters was born with a disorder that affects the development of bones in the face. "She was in hospital so much that she became a nurse." Her other sister has a learning disability and still lives with her parents, who are now in Florida. She also has a brother who works in IT for the navy.
Cooper wanted to be on stage. She went to university on a theatre scholarship, but switched to economics at her father's urging. "Any time I have any question about money, my dad is always like, 'You're an economist,'" she says. "I'm like, 'No, Dad, I got that degree for you.'" In her final year, she took a course and learnt to use Photoshop. "I loved Photoshop," she says. So she signed up for a postgraduate degree in digital design at Georgia Tech and settled in Atlanta, where she worked in advertising and for Yahoo before deciding, at the age of 30, to take another crack at acting.
"I was not very successful with it. That's when I tried stand-up… I moved to New York and I went broke," she says. "That's when I ended up at Google."
She worked there as a designer, rising into management. "I love the people there and I love the offices and the free food. I made a lot of friends. I met my husband there," she says. "At Google I was known for my soft skills. I was good in meetings. I enjoyed myself because I didn't really take any of it seriously."
While she was there she wrote a satirical piece titled 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, later expanded to 100 tricks for Cooper's first book. She advised readers to stand up, mid-meeting, and draw a Venn diagram on the whiteboard. Even if it was badly drawn, people would soon be trying to correct it and it would seem as if you had control of proceedings. She had seen it done. For the same reason, it was worth interrupting during a presentation and asking them to go back a slide. She also thought it helped if you stood up and paced about the room.
"It was based on what my co-workers were doing," she says. It did well online; many readers came to it hoping to receive actual advice. "I could track on Google how people found my article. People were searching, 'How do I look smart in a meeting?' " she says.
She fretted that her Google colleagues would take offence. "I didn't want people to think I was making fun of them, but they loved it," she says. In a meeting a fortnight later, a vice-president of the company paced the room and then asked the presenter to go back a slide. "Then he looked at me and he winked," she says. "It was really funny."
She followed up the book with another called How to be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings, which contained guidance on how to "Police Your Own Tone" and "How to Talk Like a Man but Still Be Seen as a Woman". "How much should you smile during your job interview?" she writes. "The answer is: not too much and definitely not too little. Try practising a smile that's somewhere in between, even if it makes you look like you're having a stroke. This is your best option."
The book suggests that bluster and a total lack of self-doubt can help a man get ahead, and some of this seems to have shaped the way she thinks about Trump. "Because he's rich and older, and he's a white guy and he's Trump and he's got the suit, you're just like, 'Uh-huh, well, he must know what he's talking about,' " she says. "It's like, 'No, he doesn't.' The corporate world is the same. A guy walks in, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, he uses some buzzwords and you're like, 'I guess that's, er, yeah," she says. "We learn this pattern: this is what success looks like. So if you fit the pattern, then that's success. But it's not true. There are other people that don't look like that, that don't sound like that, and actually could be good leaders as well."
Stand-up comedy sometimes seemed a man's world too. She began doing stand-up again while at Google and eventually left to pursue it full-time. There seemed to be a prevailing idea that, "If you're a good-looking person, you don't need to be funny. The idea that a woman, especially an attractive woman, would try to do this thing that's [men's] thing, that it was encroaching on their territory," she says. "I think men just like being the funny ones. This is based on my husband. He's the funniest person I've ever met in my life. If I crack him up, I know it's funny."
She thinks women are partly culpable, because they "laugh at men's jokes even when they're not funny… They are a little more generous with their smiles. We're trained to be that way." She found, "You really have to prove yourself to a male audience member."
In her stand-up routines Cooper talks about race, gender and the workplace she left. "The weirdest thing about being a Jamaican in America is that I am black, but then again, am I?" she said in a performance at a New York club. While she was at Google her manager said, "Sarah, I'm doing the diversity report. Is it OK if I say you are black?" "And I said, 'I am black.' And he goes, 'Oh, great. Even better.'"
She was starting to make her way when the pandemic closed down all the comedy clubs and she found herself at home all day with her very funny husband, Jeff Palm, whom she married in 2015. "All my comedian friends, we were all just trying things," she says. "Trying TikTok" – the video-sharing app – "trying online stand-up comedy on Zoom."
Her nephew showed her how to use TikTok last summer. Cooper decided she was too old for it. Now she returned to the medium. The most arresting new content at the time was the nightly briefing by the president and his coronavirus task force. "I was listening to the briefing and they asked him how he was going to get something done," she says. "And he said, 'I'm going to form a committee. Yeah. We'll call it a committee. And we're going to make decisions and we're going to make decisions fairly quickly and I think they're going to be the right decisions.' And I was like, 'You literally said nothing,' but he made it sound like he invented this thing called a committee." Trump actually said "committees", but it's notable how closely she recalls the phrasing of it. She preps by listening to him over and over again until she knows the pauses and the places where he draws breath.
In her first video, How to leadership, posted on April 15, Cooper wears a grey hooded jumper and leans close to the camera, looking pensive, her eyes darting back and forth, her face scrunching with the effort of thinking of the word "committee" and then relaxing into a look of satisfaction at the accomplishment.
"I always have a voice saying, 'This isn't good.' He has a voice saying, 'This is brilliant! This is the best thing I've ever come up with! I'm smarter than everybody. I'm smarter than the generals. I'm smarter than the scientists. I could have been a doctor.'"
The first videos didn't go viral. But Cooper fans, who liked her before she was famous, encouraged her to keep at it, and sent her other Trumpian statements she might do.
About eight days later, on the evening of April 23, her husband told her to watch a clip from that evening's briefing. "I had stopped watching the press briefings because they were really frustrating," she says.
So while he made dinner, she held up her phone and filmed herself standing beside a lamp, lip-synching along to Trump's lecture on how we might perhaps "hit the body" with "very powerful light". "And then," he says, "supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or, er, in some other way." Cooper gestured to her mouth, her ears, her bottom. She mimed the part of the helpless scientist at whom Trump nodded during the briefing, saying, "I think you're going to check that."
One MSNBC presenter said he likes to get her take on one of Trump's statements before he is sure what he thinks about it.
Democrats have long complained that journalists make Trump sound more sensible by pulling the best soundbites from meandering speeches. Cooper doesn't do this. "I have to listen to it over and over again," she says. "Then I get what he's trying to say."
She did one of Trump insisting that, "If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases [of the coronavirus]." Then he says, "South Korea you hear about." Cooper thinks he probably meant to argue that South Korea had fewer cases because it had conducted fewer tests overall. "I think he was trying to make that connection but then he forgot about it." In some ways, her video can seem clearer than the original presentation.
The videos have sparked a genre. There's a lady on the west coast who lip-synchs to Trump as a drunk in a nightclub, her eyes bleary, a glass in her hand. A fellow comedian in New York started doing highlights from Governor Andrew Cuomo's briefings.
It must be hard on Cooper's husband, all this attention she's getting. I bet it's tough to maintain your status as the funny one in the house when your wife is being asked to host the Jimmy Kimmel show.
"He's the funny one to me," she replies. "But I have the mainstream appeal that probably he will never have."
What about the politics? Will we see a Cooper effect? Joe Biden's team must see her as an asset. She has also been approached by Senator Kamala Harris, who was this week announced as Biden's running mate. Cooper was preparing, as we spoke, to record a conversation with Harris on Instagram Live. "She's part Jamaican too," she says, and then adds, "My husband just sent me this funny joke. Do you want to hear it? This'll show you his sense of humour."
She reads it out. "What do you get when you combine the leadership of Kamala Harris and the witty humour of Sarah Cooper? One whole black woman."
I don't know whether to laugh or not. Cooper is in hysterics. "Together we make one black woman," she says, still laughing. "It's genius. It's genius."
For her own part, she is cautious about the power of her videos. "I don't think I would change the minds of his hardcore fans," she says. But, "I think there are some people who voted for Trump and maybe just accept he is who he is, but then maybe they'd see a video and be like, 'Wow, this is unacceptable.' You know? Maybe," she says.
I guess she didn't vote for him.
"I very proudly voted for Hillary Clinton," she says. "I do think we wouldn't be in such a bad place with this pandemic if she were president. He is not a leader and we needed a leader. It would literally be better if he didn't say anything, because he says things that are wrong, that are hurting us. I worry about my mum. My mum is 70. She has asthma. She lives in Florida. She's seriously at risk." Both her sisters have disabilities and she frets for them too. "I'll be angry until the day I die that we didn't get our female president," she says.
Trump himself probably won't see her videos because he blocked her for something she said on Twitter in 2017. "I said, 'Fake news: Donald Trump has become unfit for office. Real news: Donald Trump was always unfit for office.' It wasn't even that good."
Perhaps one of his people blocked you.
She shakes her head. "It's him. He's on his phone. He's tweeting and watching television. That's all he does," she says.
I wonder how long she'll keep doing the videos. Cooper thinks they may not work if she becomes too famous. "The more people think that I'm cool, then the less it works," she says. And what if Trump wins in November? "I think whether he wins or loses, I'm done," she says. "At some point, I would like to use my own voice."
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London
