"Why Your Boomer Parents Are Obsessed With Sarah Cooper/More than anything, older Democrats and #Resistance types want to ‘trigger’ the president."

An article in Mel Magazine... whatever that is. I ended up there because that NY Magazine article I blogged in the previous post linked to another Mel article, "LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA’S LIP BITE IS A WARNING FOR EVERY STRAIGHT DUDE SELFIE/THIS IS AN INTERVENTION" ("While you may think it’s wry... [l]ip-biting is not cute. It is not going to get you laid. And it’s not what the country was founded on. If anyone should know that by now, it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda." No mention of Bill Clinton! His lip-biting worked... 30 years ago.)

So... on to Sarah Cooper, the TikTok comedian who lip syncs to snippets of Trump speaking. She doesn't try to imitate Trump, just to demonstrate that something he said is weird and dumb, mostly by facial expressions. The author at Mel, Miles Klee, says Boomers think this is the funniest thing ever and keep pushing Cooper on younger people who are not equivalently amused. Why?

Klee says Cooper is a centrist Democrat, and "nothing in her routine is too edgy or niche to upset or confuse an older audience," and older folk enjoy feeling hip enough to have something from TikTok to share — especially something from a black woman. But younger people may feel the humor is too gentle. It's just repeating Trump's own words, not attacking him for his "cruelties."

And then there's the theory that this kind of comedy is really getting to Trump:

... Cooper’s fans have developed a baseless theory that Trump’s promises to ban TikTok in the U.S. stem from his fury over her videos on the app. This ties back to their delight whenever the president rage-tweeted at Alec Baldwin. What’s funny to them in those SNL cold opens isn’t necessarily the scripted comedy but an anticipation of Trump’s “meltdown” response. This is their version of the conservative obsession with “triggering the libs,” where political humor is measured by how much it pisses off your opponent. The libs love imagining Trump in a tantrum after the Axios interview, and they’re much too eager to believe that in his vendetta against TikTok, he’s merely lashing out at a woman who “owned” him there.

I'm a Boomer, but I've never believed this idea that Trump would "melt down" and become crazy or enraged by these imitations of him. He's already more or less of an imitation of himself. He created this character Trump, and he plays him on TV and the internet. It's already comic. If other comics copy his comedy, that's a tribute to his comic creation. I do see other people buying that theory, but am I to believe they're buying it because they are older? Maybe it's mostly that age correlates to centrism, and they're just not as eager to see harsher attacks on Trump, and therefore they have a greater stake in believing that these gentle spoofs are effective.

As for me, I started sharing Sarah Cooper back in mid-May. Here was my take at the time:

I think she's great and also that it's complicated, trying to understand why [the video clips] are so great. It's not merely a matter of hating Trump. I think there's also love — illicit love! — for Trump — illicit because you're supposed to hate him — not necessarily you, you, but some of you — and by having his speech flow through an attractive woman, you become liberated to feel that transgressive love.

If I was right, then that's the reason serious Trump haters are resisting Sarah Cooper. And it should be some kind of alert about what love for Cooper's Trump really means!