It’s not easy being a woman in comedy. Just writing that sentence makes me exhausted. Sexism is so very tiring, tedious and omnipresent. So, I’ll just shorthand my point: Louis CK, constant penis jokes, rape jokes, being propositioned on the regular, being called “bitch” by audience members, being told that one woman on the bill is (more than) enough and, that at our core, women just aren’t funny. Also, there’s the joy of being introduced in one of two ways at comedy festivals: “The woman who slept with one of the judges” or “We’re so glad she’s not raped and dead in an alley.”
But, this is not a blog post about all that depressing stuff. This is about the genius and triumph of Sarah Cooper, who I’ve started referring to as “the best thing about this horrible pandemic.” If you haven’t yet seen her work, go looking for it on the web. She’s got a steady stream of work on Twitter, FB and TikTok. One upside of not being able to perform in front of a live audience (due to Covid-19) is that performers can get their work directly to fans. They don’t have to deal with bookings, snarky audience members or the aforementioned sexism. Cooper can churn out videos from her home in Brooklyn and easily blast them out to millions of fans. I’m one of her devotees, and I hope you’ll check out her work, too. She’s an amazingly effective truth-teller about our current president. More on that in a moment.
Sarah Cooper was born in Jamaica and moved to the U.S. when she was a toddler. She knew at an early age that she wanted to pursue a career in show business, but her parents strongly encouraged her to earn degrees outside of the performing arts. Cooper has a degree in Economics from the University of Maryland and one in Digital Design from the Georgia Institute of Technology, but she never abandoned her desire to be onstage. She started writing and performing stand-up comedy in Atlanta and wrote a humorous blog, including a post that went viral in 2014 called “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.”
Her 2018 book “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings” is hilarious, spot-on and chock full of handy tips like: “How much should you smile during your job interview? The answer is: not too much and definitely not too little. Try practicing a smile that’s somewhere in between, even if it makes you look like you’re having a stroke. This is your best option.” And this gem on describing your accomplishments: “…you need to strike a balance between tooting your own horn and hiding your horn behind the shed.” Yes. This is the tightrope I walk in politics, too.
Cooper’s latest project is so damn clever in its simplicity. She takes snippets of Trump’s speeches and carefully memorizes them. She nails all the pauses and inflections, and then she dubs herself giving these same speeches. She adds expressions, hand gestures, and sometimes another silent, observant Sarah Cooper as a “straight woman” or foil. Without adding any words of commentary, Cooper is able to strip the emperor naked. The format is simple but the execution requires her to be painstakingly exact. Her most recent one entitled, “How to person woman man camera tv,” is a devastating reenactment of Trump’s recent insistence that he “aced” a “very difficult” cognitive test. Cooper is an American hero. I mean it.
We need these truth-tellers, these brilliant social and political commentators. I adore the work of Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Myers. It’s not hyperbole to say they have helped me survive the Trump years. But Sarah Cooper owns pandemic comedy right now. I eagerly await each video and then revel in her comedic genius when they hit Twitter. She is the right comedian for this dystopian time; she points out the horror while making us laugh. We need this constant reminder of our resilience.
