She has 2 books that pre-date her sudden rise to comedy fame: "100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying" and "How to Be Successful without Hurting Men's Feelings: Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women."
ADDED: From the Wikipedia article on Sarah Cooper, I clicked to a NYT interview with Jerry Seinfeld from last May:
Are [your teenage children] helping introduce you to new technology and social media?Interesting, but could he really have meant to say "The reason this is funny is because she doesn’t think she’s being funny"? It's got to be something more like The reason this is funny is because she doesn’t look like she thinks she’s being funny. She's a comedian! Of course she thinks she's being funny! I'm going to assume Seinfeld thinks he's being funny but just doesn't look like he thinks he is. In that interview. When he's on stage, doing his act, he always looks like he thinks he's being funny. That's his style of comedy — very old school, and he admits it (listen to his interview with Marc Maron, here).
Oh, no. I’m curious, very briefly. “What’s TikTok?” I look at it. “OK, I got it.” The thing that I enjoy the most is debating with them about why that’s not funny and why this is funny. I retweeted this video that this comedian Sarah Cooper did. She took the voice of Trump talking about injecting yourself with disinfectant and just acted it out. I said, “The reason this is funny is because she doesn’t think she’s being funny. When you think you’re being funny, that’s less funny for us as the audience. When you’re being dead serious, that’s funnier.” You don’t see her enjoying what she’s doing — she’s doing it because she has to do it. That’s what’s funny. They got it, they understood it. Those are the kinds of conversations I love to get into with them.
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Who cares??
There will never be a book called How to Be Successful Without Hurting Women's Feelings, since that's impossible.
So hating Trump is now an industry that pairs nicely with writing how-to books. (Long ago, a friend described the genre as "How you can be like me.")
So let's do Joe Biden: The book's title would be "How to Make Your Kid Rich by Leveraging Your Political Office."
Chapter heads would include "Shaking Down Ukrainian Prosecutors for Lucrative No-Show Board Seats" and "Getting China to Toss 7 Billion Yuan into a Yet-to-Be-Formed 'Investment Fund'."
Hillary Clinton would buy that book.
"The reason this is funny is because she doesn’t look like she thinks she’s being funny."
She isn't conveying a self-congratulatory vibe in her work --there is no ironic self-awareness.
Akin to this would be:
"The reason she is sexy is because she doesn’t look like she thinks she’s being sexy."
I think most men know what that means.
I am Laslo.
I'd like her to demonstrate, as she says, how trantrics make you appear smart in a meeting.
Imus April 29 2014, reporting on Paul Simon's wife attacking Paul resulting in a 911 call and arrest, "So they were in the cottage, and she apparently was torqued off about something, and aren't they always..."
(the random Imus show played this morning)
Also: the difference between being a comedian and giving a funny performance.
Women are often good at funny performances when there is a male comedian to write for them.
That last line explains Julia Louise-Dreyfuss as Elaine, for example.
I am Laslo.
Comedy is almost always better played straight. Laughing at your own jokes is very hard to pull off. You have to give the impression that you are just thinking of it right then, so you are laughing with the audience, rather than just laughing at your own jokes.
Ok, I watched a couple videos. I don't see any insight, she's just lip-synching. Rote, mechanical. I liked the ones you posted a few months ago much better--those women brought out subtexts, added nuance. This woman... yawn.
"The reason this is funny is because she doesn’t look like she thinks she’s being funny"
Question: how often does this apply to Trump himself?
Perhaps with one amendment:
"The reason this is funny is because she doesn’t look like she thinks she’s being funny and knows that critics don't think it's funny."
Sometimes, and I mean this with love, you remind me of my teenagers with your capacity to be endlessly fascinated by the minutia of things that are pointless and beneath the notice of most adults in the first place.
Steven Wright does deadpan one liners of immense humor.
John Cleese does deadpan skits of immense humor.
Elaine Chao does deadpan standup that isn't at all funny.
Go figure.
Who cares??
Everyone should care that the "people" on TikTok are computer generated Chinese spy robots. You can tell by watching with the sound off.
Margaret Cho, not Elaine Chao, although I haven't seen Elaine's standup routine, so maybe I was right the first time.
You know how you “appear smart at meetings”? By being smart. I am not sure who the audience for your pantomime of “smart” would be, but I doubt it would be the people you imagine yourself impressing.
Margaret Cho was funny once. Jerry Seinfeld brought her on tour with him when she appeared warmed up for a college show for him as a student. She is now woke and the funny is gone.
Of course she knows she's being funny. That's the whole point of it.
The thing that strikes me watching Sarah Cooper is just how good she is nailing the drunk talker. In a previous life, I worked for years in the bar and restaurant industry with a heavy dose in the bar end of things back in the days when our job was to fill people with as much booze as possible and then send them to their cars. Strange times, looking back. Anyway, I got to see years of drunk people in all forms, doing their thing. She completely gets the business people drunk talk. She nails it. The facial expressions, the movement of the hands, with or without the cocktail held. The eyes. Really- my first thought was that she downed a couple drinks before doing her videos. She's that good.
And yes, she knows it's funny.
Trump himself has a certain comedic timing to his speaking style. A little reminiscent of Rodney Dangerfield.
"How to get by without even trying"
aka - the AOC anthem. all you need is a pretty face and some lipstick and marxist BS.
Kindergarten stuff passed off as edgy comedy.
Kindergarten stuff passed off as edgy comedy.
Interestingly, there was no more better example of the bullshit that is corporate speak than bureaucracy-speak. And NO ONE was better at it- ever- than Barack Obama. She and her interviewer state that Trump was an obvious bs speaker. But Trump's BS is so obvious, and was a known feature of his personality, that it's not a discovery. Barack was called Chauncey Gardiner for a reason. He was, and is, an empty suit, used to giving grand speeches that, if you actually pay attention to the ideas, say nothing.
He made a great career out of it. Got awarded a Nobel Prize before he even did anything. And as it turned out, the only things he's known for are blunders and very soon, spying on an opposing campaign.
I doubt that Sarah will be doing an Obama anytime soon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/fashion/weddings/sarah-cooper-and-jeffrey-palm.html
America has such incredible talents
Lip syncing carried Milli Vanilla to an Oscar
Or whatever the pop music gives great talents
All this in one DIVERSE package
hot cakes!
Does anyone watch this stuff who is not already a hard lefty?
Seinfeld is one of those guys who grew up in the late '60, early '70s and the whole Borscht Belt thing was still around...think Mrs. Maisel. I think he studied those old-school comedians and learned timing fro them, but adapted the subject of his jokes to the modern world.
His standup is not that funny, but the construction of his jokes is textbook.
As far as women standup comedians go, I find very few funny. Too many try to 'outdo the guys' and quickly resort to the crudest humor possible. But women like Julia Louise-Dreyfuss, Lucille Ball, and Carol Burnett are geniuses of comedy in acting. Lucille Ball was as good as anyone at physical comedy, and was a trailblazer for women in television.
She seems skanky.
AA - gees - did I wake up this morning and experience an alternative reality universe? Every source you cited for discussion comes from the NYT or WaPo. What gives? Or is it fiction pays for more clips versus reality.
Joe Smith said..."Seinfeld is one of those guys who grew up in the late '60, early '70s and the whole Borscht Belt thing was still around...think Mrs. Maisel. I think he studied those old-school comedians and learned timing fro them, but adapted the subject of his jokes to the modern world. His standup is not that funny, but the construction of his jokes is textbook."
Whether one likes Seinfeld or not, I find the seriousness and professionalism with which he apparently takes his craft to be very appealing. There have been a few episodes of his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee where his conversations with other comedians go deeply into analyzing comedic technique, the hard work of collecting and refining material, and even a bit of philosophizing about the nature of funny vs not funny. It's interesting how important preparation is to so many comedians, despite the appearance of spontaneity.
Misplaced pants at 7:55 nailed it.
Honestly Althouse, find some better material.
Does ANYBODY do useful work anymore?
The reason it is so funny is because it amplifies how ridiculous Trump's moronic rhetoric is and it is beyond comprehension that this is the POTUS.
Imagine Hilary or Biden going on for three minutes about how they could remember words like person, woman, man, camera and tv or that Lincoln did "some" good but I guess that is questionable. Huh?
I think Trump does great Stand Up. It's funnier because he knows that his fans are in on the joke, but his adversaries will take everything he says literally. When talking about how people say he is not presidential enough, he said that acting presidential was easy but boring. He then gave an example by scowling and glaring around the arena. IOW, what he's been doing ever since the corona virus thing started. I think his poll numbers are down, if they really are down, because he is acting too presidential.
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