Why Sarah Cooper Was Once ‘Embarrassed’ by Trump Video Response

The below is an excerpt from ‘FOOLISH: Tales of Assimilation, Determination, and Humiliation’ by Sarah Cooper.

How did a Jamaican girl grow up to be the president of the United States? Well, it’s a spellbinding tale that involves zero intrigue and absolutely no international espionage, unless you think TikTok is international espionage, which: valid.

My 2020 started out a little rocky but otherwise hunky-dory. I was living in a mostly windowless apartment in Brooklyn with Jeff. Jeff was working at Google, and I was working from home and contemplating going back to Google because my comedy career was going nowhere.

Like a lot of you, I had spent the better part of the last four years pretty glued to social media, rage reading and doom scrolling.

I was addicted to social media. I was addicted to Twitter. For almost four years, I had been watching everything Trump did with despair and sick fascination. And I gotta be honest, I was reeeeally starting to regret voting for the guy.

The thing that I hated most about Trump (among the actual reasons) was that he was exactly the kind of president I’d be. I would be like, how could he not read his intelligence briefings? But the thing is, I’ve never shown up prepared to a meeting in my life. I’d get so mad he spent all morning in bed tweeting and watching TV, but I was also in bed all morning tweeting and watching TV. I love McDonald’s. I heard he once had the Secret Service get him McDonald’s in the middle of the night and I’ve done that, too, with Uber Eats. Uber Eats was my Secret Service. I love hotels and my steak well done. We both have degrees in economics, but neither of us understands money, and we’ve both been photographed with toilet paper stuck to our shoe. I guess the difference is, if I was president, I would have at least made an attempt to hide all that. Maybe that’s where I went wrong in life.

When the world shut down, Jeff and I were all stuck at home, like everyone else. There were no shows or open mics, so I poured all my energy into making stuff for my first love: the internet. And a few weeks later I found my muse.

During one of his early COVID press conferences, Trump said, “We’re gonna form a committee. I’m gonna call it a committee. And we’re gonna make decisions. And we’re gonna make decisions fairly quickly. And I hope they’re going to be the right decisions.”

Dude made it sound like he invented committees. And everyone around him nodded like it made sense. It seemed like everyone supported this nonsense and maybe I was the one who was out to lunch. The whole administration was a charade. It was Gaslighting 101. No, no, it was Advanced Gaslighting. He was pulling off being president with smoke and mirrors.

I decided to lip-synch it on this new app my nephews Ryan and Tyler showed me, called TikTok. I wasn’t trying to be Trump. I was trying to be the me I never got to be. The me I always wanted to be. The schmoozer. The guy who used a bunch of words but said nothing and got away with it. What a dream it would be to get away with something! Anything!

That first video was so much to fun to make but it didn’t go viral. And I’m the type of person who moves on quickly to the next thing. I stopped watching his press conferences. They were unbearable anyway. But on April 23rd, Jeff came out of his office and said, “Sarah, you gotta see this.” Trump had given a press conference— a press conference that would go on to live in Lysol infamy, where he said:

We hit the body, with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re gonna test it? And then I said supposing we brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant knocks it out, in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, in-side, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re gonna have to use, medical doctors, right? But it sounds, it sounds interesting to me.

I had no notes. It was a perfect clip. He was so earnest. He genuinely thought what he was saying made sense. And I wanted to become this man, the man that I saw, this man who had absolutely no idea how he sounded, who clearly saw himself as deeply intelligent and thoughtful. Here he was, humbly asking people to listen to his brilliant idea.

I threw on a navy-blue blazer and got to work, in the living room, in the kitchen kneeling next to the sink, and back to the living room, just using whatever was around. I took off the blazer and put in clip-in bangs to create the version of myself that was listening to this nonsense and shot that, too. I did it all very quickly. I was rushing through it because I just wanted to get it over with— dinner was almost ready. My inner monologue while doing it was not, Wow, this is hysterical, it was, Does this even make sense? Why am I doing this? No one is going to watch this.

I spent two hours on the clip, shared it on my TikTok, and then shared it on Twitter. I chose the name “How to Medical” because I wanted some kind of broken sentence that didn’t make sense and that’s just what came out. And then we ate dinner. I’m pretty sure it was jambalaya. I checked Twitter and saw that the video had a few retweets and a few comments, but just as I suspected, it wasn’t going to go viral. I almost deleted it. But then I went to bed.

When I woke up, the video had a million views.

Earlier that week, a couple in Detroit, who were both essential workers, lost their only daughter to COVID. She was the youngest casualty thus far. I replied to my “How to Medical” tweet to encourage people to donate to her family and that reply started going viral, too. The attention was exciting, but feeling like it could actually help someone was even better.

I got a call from TMZ. They wanted to interview me. I got on the Zoom. They wanted to know how the video had changed my life, I said it hadn’t. The interview never aired. Jerry Seinfeld mentioned me in The New York Times, but when I told my new stand-up comedy manager, Chris Burns, he said something like, “Your friends and family must be so excited.”

So that was it. I went back to my unchanged life. I was going to find something else to do.

But Trump kept making these wild statements. And they were getting wilder and wilder. I didn’t want to keep lip-synching, but it’s like he was begging for it.

It didn’t take long before I’d created a whole series. “How to Obamagate,” “How to More Cases Than Anybody in the World,” “How to Bible,” “How to Lobster,” “How to Very Positively,” “How to Bunker,” “How to Mask,” “How to Empty Seat,” and my pièce de résistance, “How to Person Woman Man Camera TV.”

People always ask me how I chose the clips. Man, the clips just chose themselves. I mean, who talks about lobsters like that? Who would answer the question “Are you a New Testament guy or an Old Testament guy?” with “Uh, probably equal”? Who would brag about being able to remember “person woman man camera TV” in their cognitive test, and then start to forget those same five words as they went on bragging about it? Who would loudly and proudly proclaim that “MAGA loves the Black people”? Only this guy.

Someone called my videos an antidote to the gaslighting, and that’s what it felt like for me, too. Finally, we had some proof, some hilarious proof, that his words meant nothing.

I got emails and drawings and letters from so many of you saying that I made you laugh when you didn’t have anything else to laugh about. Emails like this one, shared with permission:

NAME: Candis McGovern

SUBJECT: Thank you

MESSAGE: My best friend’s mom died of COVID- 19 tonight. She went into the hospital 2 weeks ago with symptoms and never came out. She died alone and my best friend is grieving with her family and I’m insane with grief because I lost my mom when I was a teenager. I can’t even hug my friend. They couldn’t hug their mom. The reason that I’m telling you this is that your “how to wear a mask” video is the first thing that I’ve laughed at when I really thought I might never laugh again. Your work is indescribably important. Thank you so much for what you do.

I felt like I had made some kind of difference. Knowing I’d made someone smile when it was hard to smile made me feel proud.

Each video I made got millions of views . . . then my life did start to change.

I started getting attention from all kinds of journalists and celebrities and people I’d always admired. Ben Stiller was commenting on my videos. Cher retweeted me. Halle Berry called me “iconic.” I went from 60,000 Twitter followers to two million. I was on Ellen. I had an interview with Lawrence O’Donnell. And Nicolle Wallace. Jimmy Fallon had me on The Tonight Show. Kamala Harris wanted to do an Instagram Live with me.

And suddenly, very suddenly, like so fast it’ll make your head spin, and my head was spinning, I was pretty much handed the keys to Hollywood.

I signed with WME and started auditioning for high- profile projects. I got offered a series regular role on a sitcom. We sold a pilot for 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings to Netflix and I’d be working with Ricky Gervais. Ricky Gervais. We sold another pilot for How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings to CBS with Nina Tassler and Cindy Chupack. My manager texted me and said they want me to guest-host Kimmel. HOST. KIMMEL. I met with Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph and they wanted to work with me on a Netflix comedy special. I was getting a Netflix comedy special.

And then I was like, wow, I’m really glad I voted for him. Just to be clear, I did not vote for him.

If this feels fast to you, it felt that way to me, too. I can’t describe the imposter syndrome that engulfed me as all this was happening. It engulfs me even now. I’m getting imposter syndrome writing my own memoir.

I started getting recognized on the street.

The first time I got recognized I was picking up dog poop, because when you get famous for lip-synching Donald Trump, that’s the only thing that makes sense. I was walking Stella and she had just done her business like a good girl. I bent down to pick up the poop but I couldn’t open the green poop bag. So I pull down my mask to lick my fingers to open the bag during a global pandemic, and as I’m scooping this poop, I hear, “Are you Sarah Cooper?”

I look up midscoop and see this blond girl, about 12 years old, looking down at me. And I’m like, Oh my god, it’s happening! I laughed and smiled and said, “Yes, I’m Sarah Cooper!” And then I wanted to make conversation because I’ve never been recognized before and of course I want my fans to love me, so I said, “Are you on TikTok?”

And she goes, “No . . . my dad sends me your videos.”

Cool, cool, I thought.

“Cool,” I said out loud.

I was so embarrassed. I’d become an email forward from someone’s dad.

Dads love my videos. And I love dads. But I had to confront the fact that I’d built my whole life on dad humor. I know what you’re thinking: That was just one person (that’s what you were thinking, right?), but people came up to me all the time to say their dad loved my videos. In fact, two months later I was shooting my Netflix special and Marisa Tomei came over to me and said, “Sarah! Sarah! Can I get a picture with you?” I was floored. I was like, “Oh my god, Marisa Tomei wants a picture with me?” And she said, “No, it’s for my dad.”

Over the next few years, so many people recognized me, always with kind words. People come up to me and say, “I love you,” or “Thank you,” or tell me I kept them sane during the pandemic. And, yes, sometimes they mention their dad. And usually I say that making those videos kept me sane, too. But it wasn’t making them, it was seeing how happy they made other people. That’s what kept me sane.

Many, many, many months later, there was a time I became sort of embarrassed of the videos, like I didn’t want to be associated with Trump. I didn’t want to just be known for lip-synching. I didn’t want the push notification from TMZ about my death to say, “This Trump impersonator died: Click to find out how.” But that’s my imposter syndrome talking, trying to undermine what these videos actually meant.

These videos weren’t really about Trump. They were about my (our) frustration with a culture of entitlement and bullshit that valued the egos of rich (white) men over accountability.

A reporter once asked Trump if he’d seen my videos and he said he hadn’t but in a way that made me think he definitely had.

Excerpted from ‘FOOLISH: Tales of Assimilation, Determination, and Humiliation’ by Sarah Cooper (© 2023 Sarah Cooper) and published by arrangement with Dutton an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

For more, listen to Sarah Cooper on The Last Laugh podcast.

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