Sarah Cooper's Trump Lip-Syncs Turned Pandemic Boredom Into a Career Catapult

The rest, as they say, is history: Cooper is now a near household name for her wide-eyed, exaggerated lip-syncs of President Donald Trump on the video app—as well as other platforms like Twitter and YouTube. The viral videos quickly catapulted her career, leading in rapid succession to a guest-hosting spot on Jimmy Kimmel Live, a prime-time appearance at August’s Democratic National Convention, a Netflix comedy special airing this month and a TV series in development at CBS.

It’s a breakneck pace that’s made the year hard to process, Cooper admits, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t thrilled. “I’ve gone viral before, and I’ve had a few TV spots, and that got me a few book deals, but it [didn’t] change your life the way this kind of thing changes your life,” says Adweek’s Digital Creator of the Year. “I had been working for a really long time to get here, but as soon as it happened, it all happened all at the same time, so it’s been crazy.”

The comedian spoke with Adweek a week after finishing filming her Netflix special, Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine, directed by Natasha Lyonne and executive produced by Maya Rudolph. The special is, in Cooper’s own words, “about this moment in time that we’re all experiencing, where we’re trying to say everything is fine when we know it’s not fine.” That sensibility was put into even sharper focus because Cooper and the crew were filming under what she calls “surreal” Covid-19 protocols, which included regular testing, masks and ventilation breaks.

That surrealism will be woven into the special, which debuts Tuesday on the streaming service. “Instead of ignoring the conditions, we confronted them head-on—it’s part of the comedy,” Cooper explains. “People need to laugh, and we were almost forced to find the humor because it was such a bizarre situation. Everybody was motivated to create something that people can use to escape.”

That escapism is something of a new lane for Cooper, whose comedic performances on TikTok thrive in the intersection of current news events, political commentary and comedy. To make them, Cooper listened to audio clips on repeat, usually from the confines of her New York apartment she shares with her husband, nailing the cadence and working on her flashing expressions. “A lot of people saw my clips making fun of Trump and making fun of what he was saying during these task forces, and they saw that before they saw the actual clip of him saying it,” she says of the videos, which take two to five hours each to complete.

The videos, she explains, are less about impersonating Trump outright and instead rooted in highlighting the absurdity of his interviews: One of Cooper’s first viral ones, How to Medical—which has been viewed more than 23 million times on Twitter—centered on the president’s potentially dangerous suggestion of injecting disinfectant as a treatment for Covid-19. Inspired by teens’ lip-syncing on TikTok and comedian Bowen Yang’s own ultra-popular movie lip-syncs, they were born out of an extended fit of boredom brought on by extended lockdowns, plus Cooper’s frustration that Trump, to her, seemed able to get away with saying just about anything.

“I’ve always loved corporate jargon and watching people speaking in circles, but when I started watching the coronavirus task force briefings, it was frustrating having no one call him out on it,” she recalls. “I would love to be able to get away with bullshitting my way through life, so I thought, let me imitate that and have people ask, ‘Could Sarah Cooper get away with it?’”

Cooper’s interest in observation and humorous imitation, bolstered by her admiration of comedy legends like Garry Shandling, Ricky Gervais and Larry David, has been a through line of her career and has helped shape her own unconventional rise to stardom. In her past life at Google—what she calls her “fallback career”—Cooper recalls having a conversation with an engineer that fared poorly, underscoring where the boundaries around her own speech were.

“I told him I thought what we had built just did not look very good, and then I was told in my performance review that I needed to be more sensitive,” she says. “There were a lot of things that men got away with there that I couldn’t get away with as a woman, and as a Black woman.”

After leaving Google, Cooper was able to spin those observations from her corporate life into a viral Medium post, How to Appear Smart in Meetings, which expanded into a three-book deal. She’s revisiting some of those observations for her upcoming project for CBS, How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings, the same title as Cooper’s first book. The single-camera comedy, which Cooper is co-writing with Sex and the City and Modern Family writer Cindy Chupack, will center on three women working in male-dominated workplaces.

“A lot of people have said my books made them laugh, but that they also made them cry,” Cooper says. “Being able to create this show and say, ‘This is messed up; why do we have to deal with this?’—that has been such an awesome experience.”

Cooper credits it all to TikTok, Twitter and the unpredictable nature of digital virality. “The internet has just shown us that there is no one path to getting to where you want to be,” Cooper says. “I owe almost all of my success to going viral and Twitter and all of the social media tools you have, and you really just have to try a bunch of different things and know that the success might not come from where you expect it to come.”

But there’s one thing that Cooper is expecting—or, at least, hoping for: “My goal in 2021 is that I will not be making Trump TikToks anymore,” she laughs, “and that we can all move on.”

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