Trump lip-syncing comic’s special odd, brilliant
Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine Unrated. Running time: 49 minutes. Available on Netflix. out of 4
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Sarah Cooper is one of the few good things to come out of the pandemic. She vaulted to public attention by lip-syncing Donald Trump in aseries of funny and eerily perceptive videos. Now, with a comedy special, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine,” streaming on Netflix, she launches her big national career.
It’s a seriously interesting debut that confronts the particular difficulty of making social and political satire in a fraught time. It’s the same difficulty that “Saturday Night Live” has been dealing with recently, but with less success. The satirist’s dilemma can be summarized with a question: Does it really work to stand outside a burning building and make pyromaniac jokes? Maybe. Possibly. But how about if screams are still coming from the building?
“Saturday Night Live,” as an established brand, can only apply its old style to new and more dire circumstances, and with mixed results. But Cooper is brand-new, and she makes use of her newness by responding with a type of comedy that’s also brand-new, that’s absurdist, freeassociative and nightmarish.
It’s a style of comedy that doesn’t have jokes, exactly. The whole spectacle is funny, but you can laugh at any point, or not at all. “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” is a wildly creative, on-target and proportional comic response to everything we’re going through. It is comedy for an anxiety-ridden moment.
Part mock documentary and part TV parody, the special stars Cooper as the host of a morning show called “Everything’s Fine.” A voice-over narrator tells us that every time Cooper has to say the title of her show on air, she feels like she’s about to lose her mind, and Cooper conveys that. She is genial and smiling, but her eyes always look terrified.
Actually, this smiling-but-terrified look is common with Cooper. It’s central to her comedy, and it may also
reflect her own frame of mind. In any case, assuming the persona of a secretly terrified woman had to make it easier for her to play opposite the cast of established celebrities who make appearances here. These include Jane Lynch, Maya Rudolph and Helen Mirren.
Cooper lip-syncs Trump on two occasions. In the first, she appears, as Trump, on a golf course, speaking vaguely and incoherently about his
policy initiatives. Later, in a longer sequence, she takes us onto the “Access Hollywood” bus, where Cooper as Trump and Mirren as Billy Bush enact the infamous tape against a background of gym lockers. The effect of seeing two women snapping towels at each other and performing the tape is deeply strange, and at least as disturbing as it is funny.
“Everything’s Fine” is full of bizarre and imaginative skits. Maya
Rudolph plays a TV meteorologist, whose five-day forecast includes 120-degree days, followed by 20degree days, followed by days in which snowmen are expected to burst into flames. Lynch plays a “Karen” who assumes that Sarah Cooper is a criminal impostor and calls the police. This is followed by a Ken Burns-style documentary about Karens through history, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg. And Aubrey Plaza has a funny-weird bit in which she appears as the hostess of a QAnon home-shopping network.
We have had cringe comedy for most of the 21st century. In “Everything’s Fine,” Cooper goes beyond that. This is the comedy of dread, of fear, of mutually understood misery. At one point, as the morning-show host, she hypes a segment on “fall fashions you can wear to that conference call in your bedroom!” Later, she attempts a magic act, performing card tricks before a drive-in audience. In depicting such joyless attempts at enthusiasm and normal life, Cooper shows us the unrewarding counterfeit that is our current existence. She seems to be commiserating.