The comedian and Trump lip-sync master honed her humor skills right before our eyes. I went through 100s of tweets, vids and blog posts to find out how.
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NOTE: Sarah was nice enough to tweet out this article and it crashed my website. I write about that here.
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As popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell, the 10,000-Hour Rule states that it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill.
One of the joys of the internet age is that we get to watch people master skills in public.
Sarah Cooper is the latest example of someone who has put in the hours and blown up right before our eyes.
On April 23rd, 2020, Cooper tweeted a gut-bustlingly funny Tik Tok video.
Titled “How to medical”, the video is an epic lip-synch of Donald Trump’s infamous “disinfectant and UV” coronavirus press conference.
As an immigrant female Jamaican-American ex-Googler turned comedian, Cooper is basically the perfect demographic foil to Donald Trump.
Her first Trump lip-synch video has garnered 22m views, 574k faves and 195k re-tweets.
Odds are that you’ve seen this comedic gold.
In the 7 weeks since that post, Cooper has exploded in popularity.
According to Social Blade, the @sarahcpr Twitter account has added ~1m followers (now totalling 1.4m) since that tweet.
She has posted an additional 15+ Trump impersonation videos. All of them are f*cking glorious.
Combined, the videos are nearing 100m views on Twitter.
In addition to the phenomenal engagement numbers, three giants of comedy have recently blessed her efforts:
Jerry Seinfeld
Ellen DeGeneres
Ben Stiller
Just last week, Cooper signed with talent powerhouse WME and her next project is “a modern, comedic take on a Dale Carnegie book for Audible Originals.” 😂
How Cooper arrived here is no mystery.
She has been honing her comedic skills publicly on the internet for more than a decade.
Her reps include office doodles, open mics, Twitter jokes, stand-up comedy, blogging, book writing and acting in short skits.
In an effort to outline her 10,000-hour comedic journey, I went through hundreds of Cooper’s tweets, blog posts and videos.
Here are two key takeaways from my research:
- Keep experimenting. Gary Vaynerchuk equates social apps and digital tools to “crayons” that can be used to create new types of art. Cooper has experimented with every “crayon” available to find her comedic voice.
- Work in public. To find success, Cooper says, “You need to do a lot of work. You need to finish a lot of work. You need to share a lot of work.” The lesson here is that you never know who’s reading, watching or listening. If you’re already creating, you might as well put it out there and give your audience a chance to find you.
Cooper’s story is pieced together from podcasts ( here, here, here) and Youtube (here, here).
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1. Doodling at the Office & Early Twitter Usage
Cooper’s professional background is in UX design.
She spent 3.5 years at Google (2011-2014) and — prior to that role — 2 years at Yahoo! (2006-2008). 1
This corporate background — specifically in the tech industry — gave Cooper the ammo she needed to write her first viral blog post (more on this later).
And that blog post ultimately led to her first book deal.
According to Cooper, she actually doodled her first corporate joke while at Yahoo! (in 2008):
“I was in a meeting…when a product manager [started drawing a Venn diagram]. It was sort of related to what we were talking about but ultimately made no sense at all. But, instead of everyone making fun of him, something weird happened. Everyone started helping him draw the Venn diagram…and I thought to myself, that’s a pretty cool trick. That made him look pretty smart, so I wrote it down in my notebook.”
Here is the original notebook doodle.
For 7 long years, Cooper did nothing with this joke.
Thankfully, over that time span, Cooper left comedic bread crumbs on Twitter.
She started tweeting on May 3rd, 2008.
Her early tweets were mostly status updates.
However, between tweets of “doing laundry” and “heading to work”, Cooper sprinkled in some jokes including…
…a hint at her future book writing career…
…and an eye for pop culture related jokes.
In the lead-up to the 2008 US Presidential election, she tweeted about Sarah Palin, foreshadowing her present-day political joke mastery.
Speaking of practice, 2 Cooper ended up posting more than 37k tweets prior to the “How to medical” video!
It was also during this period that Cooper started hitting open mics.
She has continued to hone her stand-up skills in the years since (here is one from 2018) and — I’d bet once the dust settles — Cooper will get a Netflix or Amazon special.
2. The Breakthrough & The Blog
In a continuation of her “original doodle” story, Cooper said she was working at Google when that first joke came back into her life:
“I put that notebook away and I didn’t look at it for 7 years. Then I came across it again. I was at Google at the time [2014] and I had been in more meetings than I had been before and it kind of re-sparked this idea of what do smart people do in meetings? Because without articulating it, I knew that a very large part of my job was to go to meetings and appear smart in them.”
With that inspiration, Cooper turned her original Venn diagram drawing into a Medium article: 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings.
Her writing style is to combine funny blurbs with comic-ish drawings.
And, sure enough, the first trick that is highlighted in the Medium article is a riff on the original doodle: “Draw a Venn Diagram”:
Other gems from that post include “Encourage everyone to take a ‘step back'” and “Nod continuously while pretending to take notes”. hahhaha
Cooper’s tweet (July 7th, 2014) pushing the article became her most faved and shared tweet ever (to that point).
Within 8 days, she published her next piece: 11 Tricks to get engineers to sort of respect you.
By the end of the year, the burgeoning comedian had left Google, was working on her own web property (www.TheCooperReview.com) full time and her viral blog was being repurposed by corporate workers across America.
Aside from the first posts, other bangers from The Cooper Review include:
- 9 Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies For Women (also turned into a book)
- How To Say Goodbye To Your Coworkers
- The Difference Between Living in NY and SF
- Delta’s New Airplane Seating Chart
Along the theme of learning in public, Cooper also published two articles showing her methods.
- How To Create Viral Content
- “Put attributions in your images”
- “Tuesdays are good for posting”
- “Stats are distracting” (when an article blows up, its demotivating)
- Her WordPress theme (The Voice theme by Meks)
- How To Draw
- Cooper reveals the “secret” of her art
- She takes live photos and traces around the figures and fills in color where applicable
The blog now has 150+ blog posts with 11mn+ total views (and 14k+ subscribers for a newsletter that is currently dormant).
Cooper’s blog was the catalyst that launched her comedic career and provided a space to get in some serious comedic reps.
3. The Book Deal
Based on the viral success of 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings (5m+ views and hundreds of thousands of shares), Cooper scored a book deal.
The final product was an extension of the original Medium article and was titled 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying.
It was released in October 2016 with some high profile blurbs including Dan Lyons (tech journalist and writer on HBO’s Silicon Valley) and Adam Grant (Wharton professor and best-selling author).
The book quickly hit #1 in Amazon’s “Communication Skills” niche; Cooper found this extremely hilarious:
The book’s success secured another deal and, in October 2018, Cooper released How to Be Successful without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women.
4. Experimenting With Video
In addition to writing (blogs, books, tweets) and doing stand-up, Cooper has been toying with comedy videos for 6 years.
Across two Youtube channels (“Sarah Cooper“, “The Cooper Review“), Cooper has posted 20+ video skits.
These short skits (<4 minutes) were filmed from 2014-17 and have been viewed a total of 1.5m times.
From these skits, you can already see Cooper’s great sense of comedic timing and the subtle ticks that make on-screen humor work.
As recently as 2017, there was an attempt to do a short scripted series called The Bubble.
However, her most popular Youtube videos are singular joke concepts: “How to Cry on Cue” and “Snapchat on Shark Tank”.
My personal favourite (and the first one I ever saw) was “How to Dance at your Office Holiday Party” (the techno music in the video is incredible).
While the total views across these Youtube videos pale in comparison to her Trump lip-synchs, Cooper’s experience with the format definitely prepared her for the moment to come.
5. The Road to Trump
On June 14th, 2015, Donald Trump took the “escalator ride that changed America”.
Amazingly, Cooper’s first swipe at Trump took place 6 weeks before the real estate mogul announced he was running for President.
From the announcement of his candidacy, Cooper (like most of American media) started revving up the Trump commentary:
She also wrote an obligatory Trump-related blog post.
And here is Cooper’s first tweet when she realized that Trump was going to win (pretty restrained considering the circumstances).
While the text-based Trump jokes continued apace following the election, Cooper actually hinted at her future lip-synchs with a tweet in the summer of 2019.
In this video, Cooper does an impersonation of Meghan McCain (it’s been viewed 1.7m times).
By the time that shelter-in-place orders swept across America, Cooper had spent 12 years perfecting her craft.
Befitting a 10,000 hour journey that constantly saw experimentation (tweeting, writing, drawing, open mics, stand-ups, acting) the groundwork was laid for Cooper’s next breakthrough via a new platform: Tik Tok.
Tik Tok has served as a great middle ground between Cooper’s tweets, stand-up and short-form Youtube videos.
According to an interview Cooper recently did with The Atlantic, the comedian explained how she viewed the new-ish social platform:
“I have all these stories that I tell on stage, how can I put this into this new medium? TikTok’s not really my platform; Twitter is, but I find TikTok to be this amazing tool for creating new visual interpretations of existing audio. So I’ve been experimenting.”
She adds in her interview with Ellen:
“I bribed my nephews to show me Tik Tok…[when I was locked away in Quarantine], I checked it out again and it’s all these kids lip-synching to music, TV scripts and movie scripts and — I was like — it would be cool if I could lip-synch Trump because I’m so different than who he is. I’m a black woman, I’m an immigrant. And the stuff he gets away with saying, I could never get away with saying…unless I lip-synch him. So I decided to give it a shot.”
Cooper ports her Tik Tok work over to Twitter, which is her main stomping ground.
Clearly, her decision to give the new social app a shot has paid dividends.
In addition to the “How to medical” lip-synch, super popular videos include:
“How to bunker”
“How to bible“
“How to lobster”
“How to Lincoln” (this one is so so so so good)
(You can watch all of her Tik Tok videos here)
Sarah Cooper’s quarantine rise has been absolutely meteoric.
Her 10,000 hours of comedic prep and constant experimentation put her in a position to explode when the perfect opportunity presented itself.
The opportunity came and she delivered…in a huge way.
What a legend!
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