For writer-comedian Sarah Cooper, the pandemic hasn’t been so terrible. In fact, by making the best of a lousy situation — in this case, opening a TikTok account while sheltering in place and lip syncing to the often-bizarre ramblings of Donald Trump to underscore their absurdity — she has become an outlet for a country that has often found itself asking while watching a Trump presser: “Is this real, what I’m seeing?”
Now, in addition to the millions of online followers she has amassed since March, Cooper — a Jamaican American who once worked at Google — has landed a Netflix comedy special.
Titled “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine,” the writer and producer Natasha Lyonne is set to direct the production, and it will be executive produced by the comic-actor Maya Rudolph (who will herself be increasingly busy, reprising her role on “Saturday Night Live” as Senator Kamala Harris).
It’s just the latest — and biggest — feather in the cap of Cooper, who lives in New York with a software engineer husband whom she has kiddingly described as running out of patience with her Trump schtick. He “has to hear Donald Trump’s voice over and over again,” as she told Vanity Fair this summer. “I think he’s probably going to jump out the window at some point.”
Cooper also recently signed with the talent agency WME, appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon in June, and yesterday, even guest-hosted “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Her monologue (below) hilariously skewers her former employer, incidentally. “People always ask me if it was fun to work at Google, and it was fun. I knew I was having fun because they kept telling me how much fun I should have each quarter, or else I would be fired.”
According to that VF interview, Cooper’s other TV ambitions include writing a show about an overly confident boss who “fucks up all over the place and still somehow fails up.”
It isn’t clear if this Netflix special scratches that itch, but no doubt plenty of Trump detractors — and some supporters — will be keeping an eye out to see what it does feature. While Netflix isn’t sharing many specifics, it does say the production will be a variety special whose various vignettes deal “with issues of politics, race, gender, class, and other light subjects.”
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