Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine review - TikTok star proves there's more to her than Trump lip-syncs
You probably know Sarah Cooper from TikTok or Twitter — she’s the author and comedian whose viral videos, in which she mimes along to President Trump’s barely lucid blatherings, have been some of the funniest things to come out of the pandemic.
Those lip-syncs turn up within minutes of her new Netflix special, Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine. With the distractions of a high-budget production behind them, they do sometimes lose the immediacy that made them so amusing in the first place, but there are some gems. A section in which Cooper co-opts the voices of Melania and Ivanka Trump is spookily hilarious. And then at the end, when she reanimates Trump’s skin-crawling “grab her by the…” recording, her choice of guest stars is sublime — they might just be the two best cameos of 2020.
The show itself takes the form of a surreal TV news programme called Everything’s Fine, hosted by Cooper, whose teetering sanity is pushed ever closer to the edge by a succession of inept co-workers and crazed guests. There are plenty of celebrity drop-ins — Ben Stiller plays a humanoid CEO of a tech company, Jon Hamm is a pillow inventor hawking a dubious Covid-19 vaccine, and Whoopi Goldberg narrates a history of ‘Karens’.
It’s all painfully topical, to the point that it almost comes across as some sort of 2020 time capsule. It covers coronavirus, racism, #MeToo, climate change and more, with some hyper-specific sections — the takedown of all those super-twee adverts that have been popping up recently is particularly satisfying.
Some of the writing can seem a tad obvious, but the show is at it’s best when it indulges its darker tendencies. Aubrey Plaza as the host of QAnon QAC — the QVC shopping channel with conspiracy theories, basically — is genuinely unsettling, as is the sketch that morphs into a trailer for a new Jordan Peele horror film.
So while Everything’s Fine could do with some trimming, Cooper has proved with this special that she is so much more than just a fleeting viral star.
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