Satirizing the Jonathan Swan interview

August 6, 2020 6:48 AM

Making fun of Trump — who has long existed as outright self-parody — was never easy. Two parodies of the Axios interview from yesterday deserve mention:
1. Study Hall
2. Do you like me, Jonathan? (By TrumpDraws!). (Via)
Extra: The Curb Your Enthusiasm version
And Extra/Extra: Why Your Boomer Parents Are Obsessed With Sarah Cooper:... “For your parents, at least — the pleasure of seeing Cooper or anyone else simulate Trump’s idiocy is directly tied to the hope that he’ll see it and be very, very mad. That’s their little revenge, and they’re addicted to it. Harmless in the short-term, no doubt; the worry is that over time, the schtick folds fascism, hate and violence into simple clownery. With Trump, that’s a mistake we’ve repeated since the start”.
posted by growabrain (45 comments total)

For your parents, at least — the pleasure of seeing Cooper or anyone else simulate Trump’s idiocy is directly tied to the hope that he’ll see it and be very, very mad. That’s their little revenge, and they’re addicted to it.

I really have to disagree with this. For many of us, acts like Sarah Cooper are more like a safe harbor, as a fleeting gasp of air during the constant flood of insanity that we feel powerless to stop. It's not revenge. It's a brief and blessed mental health break.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:51 AM on August 6, 2020 [68 favorites]

Also, the attempt to claim a universal "For your parents, at least — the pleasure of seeing Cooper or anyone else simulate Trump’s idiocy is directly tied to the hope that he’ll see it and be very, very mad" assumes facts not in evidence, given any lack of a survey. In fact, the Mel article is full of lazy generational stereotyping with minimal actual evidence, which has become one of my least favorite things.
posted by tavella at 7:59 AM on August 6, 2020 [69 favorites]

That Klee article is basic bottom-feeding internet journalism: find something popular, then find some tweets from people who don't like it, and try to make the latter into a thing by slathering on the feel-good snark about boomers.
posted by senor biggles at 8:05 AM on August 6, 2020 [18 favorites]

Before anyone (else) gets too upset about the utterly inane "LOL Boomers" article, take a look at the guy's byline at the bottom:

"Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert."

Yes. It's garbage. And frankly, I didn't think we did that kind of content at MeFi anymore. But if we do, just be aware of what it is.

(Disclaimer: Old, white, liberal, almost-but-not-quite-Boomer parent who is obsessed with Sarah Cooper.)
posted by The Bellman at 8:14 AM on August 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

My personal favorite so far has been this mashup with the parrot sketch.
posted by billjings at 8:30 AM on August 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

It made a very funny episode of Veep
posted by Zonker at 8:30 AM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

My first reaction to the Sarah Cooper article was, “Oh no, I’m ‘your parents’ in this article!” but seeing as everyone’s reaction so far is “no, it’s the children who are wrong,” well, she’s not doing much other than point directly at Trump’s awfulness through his own words. Yes it’s not quite as devastating as I’d like to imagine it is (to him or his followers) but it IS a nice chuckle and I am ok with liking it.
posted by sleeping bear at 8:32 AM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

It's not revenge. It's a brief and blessed mental health break.

Agreed. The Sarah Cooper videos are reassuring, in the way that 'No, I'm not crazy, THAT guy is crazy, and I'm not the only one who sees it.'

I am not the least bit concerned about Donnie's feelings, whether he gets mad or not. I do not care about revenge, I just want the madness to stop.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:43 AM on August 6, 2020 [28 favorites]

Why Your Boomer Parents Are Obsessed With Sarah Cooper

I don't know about all that. The anti-Trump Boomers in my life have absolutely no idea who Sarah Cooper is, and would chuckle then forget about the video in minutes if I showed them. My Gen X self, on the other hand, found out about her from a Millennial, though, and we both think she's pretty hilarious. Neither of us have any reason to think Trump will ever see her or care about her.
posted by solotoro at 8:46 AM on August 6, 2020 [25 favorites]

I'm thinking that the headline I saw further down,
"Is the Kool-Aid Man the liquid, or the container?"
would make for a more fun MeFi discussion than the
"anything not Chapo / Cum Town is for lame squares"
article. How dare anyone giggle at anything insufficiently hip?
What are you, some kind of Biden voter? Eew.
posted by bartleby at 9:00 AM on August 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

Agree with the previous comments on the so-called boomer obsession with Sarah Cooper. I love Sarah Cooper - a young, female, POC comedian satirizing an old, racist, misogynist politician? I'm totally there for that. I read an analysis that was much more authentic to me - her parodies work because she strips away all of his old, racist, misogynist white privilege and all you've got left is his inane gibberish (and Sarah Cooper's on point facial expressions). And I give a shit about whether Trump sees it/is mad about it/wants to ban it. I think it's awesome. (and a boomer not on twitter may not know about her).
posted by bluesky43 at 9:03 AM on August 6, 2020 [20 favorites]

The anti-Trump Boomers in my life have absolutely no idea who Sarah Cooper is

This OGX 'boomer' was just about to post the question -- who is she? With these links, I'll find out. Thanks for the videos, growabrain! The first one made my day.
posted by Rash at 9:07 AM on August 6, 2020

Sara Cooper
Person man woman camera tv
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:11 AM on August 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

... would chuckle then forget about the video in minutes if I showed them.

Oh right -- she's the one who lip-syncs. Does nothing for me -- irritating, actually. The really effective stuff comes from The Lincoln Project.
posted by Rash at 9:19 AM on August 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

What Sarah does for me, at any rate, is to make visible what it would look like if a person who possessed a soul and a working mind tried to bumble through the torrent of lies that is emitted from Trump. It helps to make sense of the whole chaotic episode of a Trump utterance.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 9:37 AM on August 6, 2020 [16 favorites]

Sara Cooper does it for me and my wife (we are solidly 'Gen X') - mostly because she illustrates the ... well-nigh unspeakable, monstrous idiocy of so much that Trump says. She's perfect satire.

In the interview itself Swan's mugging like crazy (which I don't I've ever seen before (and made me think this would be grabbed on to by any Trump lover, "See, he hates him! He's not even listening!") made me wonder if Swan wasn't betraying some journalistic "show don't tell" interviewing rule: "don't react to the crazy, just reveal it." Conversely, though, his reactions were the only way to convey anything - Trump is so perfectly immune to being held to account - the mugging almost stood in for everything you might want to hear said overtly ("Shouldn't you know more about the US's standing vis-a-vis other countries and the number of deaths due to Corona Virus?")

Trump is as much a cultural phenomenon as a political one. God help us if the election doesn't see the end of him.
posted by From Bklyn at 9:38 AM on August 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

I'm at the tail end of GenX. In general, the Trump-mockery school of comedy does nothing for me, because he is 1) already a clown and 2) fucking evil. I don't need someone to lip-sync him, or make a meme out of him, or otherwise try to score comedy points off of an existential threat to humanity. Some people go so far as to give their dogs Trump chew toys. I guess everyone needs a comping mechanism, but to my mind making fun of him is redundant and pointless. Let's just get him out of office, put him in jail and burn his memory from our brains as quickly as possible.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:42 AM on August 6, 2020 [12 favorites]

I don't care for either the humor or the article trashing the humor. Myself, I have been tired of making fun of the obvious things about Trump for nigh on four years now. There's no tooth in it, to me. Part of his appeal to those he appeals to is that he's "blunt" or "kind of a jerk" as I have heard, which is how cognitive dissonance treats "racist," "stupid," and, increasingly, "senile." So the jokes don't make any inroads to anyone. If you like them, that's fine; what's funny is subjective. But to me, each gaseous emission just highlights the powerlessness of the greater part of the American people -- temporary, we can hope, but it is not certain -- and our national shame, which will take generations to efface.

Still, I don't have any patience for pointless leftist sniping about liberals in general or a female comedian of color in particular. This is not the year for the circular firing squad.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:44 AM on August 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

Dammit, I shouldn’t have added the last link
posted by growabrain at 9:51 AM on August 6, 2020 [7 favorites]

My feelings about media mocking Trump lean in the direction of Truffaut and anti-war films.
posted by figurant at 9:51 AM on August 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Is there any evidence he's actually seen her videos?


I mean, aside from the whole destroy-TikTok thing.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:52 AM on August 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

(To be honest, I have to admit I am thinking not so much of Cooper with that last comment as a Boomer all-star Facebook video song parody called "The Liar Tweets Tonight" to which I was directed. Bless their hearts, I just ...)
posted by Countess Elena at 9:57 AM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

me wonder if Swan wasn't betraying some journalistic "show don't tell" interviewing rule: "don't react to the crazy, just reveal it."

Someone suggested (insightfully, I think) that his real trick was to take everything Trump said seriously, as if Trump meant it, as if Trump was a man who was president and had important things to say. So he actually listened to the responses, was surprised by the fact that they didn't make sense, and asked follow up questions on topic.

He was also very well prepared. I've come to believe something I've seen many journalists say: that many *don't* know enough to push back confidently on the specifics of some claim (like case fatality rate vs. per capita death rate) on the spur of the moment. Which is, to be fair, harder than it sounds if you're trying on camera to digest a dense table with weird units that you haven't seen before.
posted by mark k at 10:19 AM on August 6, 2020 [21 favorites]

I hadn't seen any of this and I'm delighted. I promise I can make time to both laughing at the absurdity and working to vote Trump out of office. I appreciate all the links. Also, Sarah Cooper's work here goes beyond just a lip synch. Her decisions on how to present each shot, and incorporate bystanders, really tell a story. I'm an instant fan.
posted by meinvt at 10:25 AM on August 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

Reminds me [MedianBoomer] of Spitting Image; a 1980s British TV programme that guyed the Establishment: Royal Family, Thatcher's Conservative government, Reagan, PopStars etc. It had massive viewing numbers [in a TV world with much less choice] from across the political divide, in a deeply divided society. A case was made at the time that, by providing a weekly safety valve for the dispossessed to laugh at the oppressor, it prevented a civil war revolution.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:38 AM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

I can't stand watching Trump talk. I can't stand listening to him on the radio. We're talking visceral disgust and a lunge to turn off the media source. But I appreciate Sarah Cooper's videos. She's damn talented and one hell of a buffer (and reminded me that I really should watch The Usual Suspects soon.)

OTOH, that Boomerama of The Liar Tweets Tonight mentioned above -- that was something. Um. Yeah.
posted by maudlin at 12:27 PM on August 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

I don't imagine my loberal Boomer parents have seen Sarah Cooper to have an opinion about her. I do know that my mom is mad about Randy Rainbow though, who I can only tolerate in small doses.
posted by St. Oops at 12:46 PM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

Same here, but I’d really like to see Randy Rainbow do “person woman man camera tv.”
posted by sjswitzer at 1:00 PM on August 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

I don't really get the Randy Rainbow thing either, but I attribute that to my disinterest in song parody as a genre as opposed to claiming that he is papering over the administration's crimes against humanity or whatever.
posted by Think_Long at 1:07 PM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

My feelings about media mocking Trump lean in the direction of Truffaut and anti-war films.

The modern problem with "hey, look at this dangerous idiot being a dangerous idiot" is that "hey, look at this" is a much stronger (and unambiguous) signal than "dangerous idiot". Any publicity is good publicity!
posted by neckro23 at 1:08 PM on August 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

It has been saddening see everyone say all manner of thing regarding negative reactions to Trump, that they are misguided, that they normalize him, that they actually further fascism, etc. I've said some of it myself. The number of times I've complained about stupid Twitter nicknames for him, like "tRump" or "Dishonest Don," as if the typical responses to bad politicians were somehow enough.

But the number of those complaints make it feel like overthinking, like, "We made fun of them THIS way and it didn't work! It must actually have helped him!" There are so many people who detest Donald Trump, there's going to be a hundred different ways it is expressed.

Trump and his plethora of Republican enablers are doing what they're doing because they can, they have absolutely no shame or moral center, and nothing short of direct violent action could stop them. Trump isn't normalized; they just don't care, and absolutely won't, unless they're thrown out of office. The result of all this will be seen November 3, and not a day earlier.

(Also keep in mind: if Trump loses, all of this will not be over. Trump is a symptom of a deep-set rot. We have a lot of work to do.)
posted by JHarris at 1:15 PM on August 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

I'm a Xennial and I watch Sarah Cooper because listening to Trump unfiltered tends to make me actually feel physically ill. Watching him speak through the Sarah Cooper filter is like having a friend in the room agreeing with me that he's awful, which helps in the same sort of way I imagine bringing a friend along to chemo does.

I really like the Study Hall parody but I also kind of hate it because it makes it seem like there could possibly be in some alternate universe a slightly cogent version of Trump who could actually be failing less hard at handling this pandemic.

It also makes me think about how often the media edits his quotes down to bits to try to make some sort of sense of them, and winds up making him sound more sensical than he does in full context. He is one of the few politicians who benefits from being quoted out of context in the press.
posted by BlueJae at 3:01 PM on August 6, 2020 [28 favorites]

Trump is hypersensitive to mockery.

Remember when he went to one of the World Series games and had to fight back tears when he realized the DC crowd was chanting "lock him up" instead of cheering for him? And when he wanted to find and prosecute the person who 'leaked' that he scurried to the White House bunker as fast as bone spurs would allow when there was a fairly mild demonstation outside the White House? Or when he felt compelled to call himself "a stable genius" when people were making fun of all his public blunders?

Not to mention his determination to exact revenge on Obama for relentlessly mocking him from the podium during the White House Correspondents Association dinner the evening of the day Osama bin Laden was killed (I hope I'm remembering that right) — a determination which might well cost him his Presidency since it's arguably what led him to hold that press conference during which he personally and gleefully announced the dismantling of Obama's prescient early pandemic warning program.

Trump is wounded by satire like no other President in history.
posted by jamjam at 6:00 PM on August 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

What Sarah does for me, at any rate, is to make visible what it would look like if a person who possessed a soul and a working mind tried to bumble through the torrent of lies that is emitted from Trump. It helps to make sense of the whole chaotic episode of a Trump utterance.

Thank you for articulating this. I could not understand, myself, why I find her work so compelling. This is it, right here. Trump channelled through a real live human.
posted by Meatbomb at 7:07 PM on August 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

I envy all you people who have Boomer parents that hate Trump. Cooper doesn’t do all that much for me personally, but honestly, if your parents are super into her, count your blessings.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:43 PM on August 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

I wrote up a whole thing about the Sarah Cooper article and decided to delete it all because it's probably not going to lead to productive discussion. But I will say this: I'm surprised at just how many people disliked that article, because for me it was the first time anything was able to really articulate why I never really laughed at Sarah Cooper's videos, and why a certain segment of people in my life whose main approach with Trump is to call him stupid or incompetent feel kind of icky to me. Like, we are SO far past this now. Anything less than a full-throated attack on the Trump administration and everything it stands for feels toothless. It feels dangerously close to pretending that the real problem with Trump is that he doesn't know how to do his job, downplaying that if he DID know how to do his job, they'd already be changing all the maps to read "The Fascist States of America."
posted by chrominance at 9:25 PM on August 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

I just can't watch Trump spewing lies out of his gross cakehole. Sarah Cooper's miming is the only way I can listen to him.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:51 PM on August 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

"Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert."

I mean if we're talking generational divides this just means he mostly writes lightheartedly about silly internet stuff. He's not an incredible writer or anything but he's alright.

I've never seen Cooper and I don't think my mom has either, so I don't have an opinion about that, but a couple things Klee says basically echo things people are saying here, too:

I just can't watch Trump spewing lies out of his gross cakehole. Sarah Cooper's miming is the only way I can listen to him.

But my own half-baked ultra-downer thesis is that people who still want to write about whether satirizing Trump means anything are a step behind the realization/acceptance that a "full-throated attack on the Trump administration also feels toothless.
posted by atoxyl at 3:15 AM on August 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

TIL Sarah Cooper's schtick is - maybe - generationally divisive. Huh. And if so, could it be that just pretty much anything their parents find collectively amusing is DOA for them? Now that would be novel, eh?

While Tina Fey chose to do Palin as a straight-up impersonation - and it worked not least of all because Palin chose to flaunt the sex kitten, er uh, tiger milf persona and Tina could >do< that, too - but also and mostly because, just like Cooper, they'd found a ridiculously rare person whose boundless utterances of imbecilic inanity needed only to be repeated verbatim to make that itself the humor. I don't even have to write anything, all I have to do is repeat his/her word salad verbatim and toss in a few physical tics and expressions and it's gold!

The fact that we've had two of those people in the span of a decade running for the White House - and for whom this incredibly unlikely angle at humor was even possible - is in itself remarkable.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 11:28 AM on August 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

As a takeaway from this Klee piece this quote stood out for me:

Maybe millennials and zoomers, as a rule, are less enthusiastic when it comes to playing up Trump’s stupidity in a way that skirts the harm he inflicts. The white Boomers, meanwhile, are more likely to have some distance from the cruelties familiar to vulnerable groups during this administration; Trump’s buffoonish ignorance isn’t all that scary to them. Cooper’s material provides a sound argument for the emperor having no clothes, and her fans appear to relish this idea of humiliation.

I think that's the most important take away from the article, Cooper is just the incidental. The people I know who lean hard into the "President Cheetoh" or "Drumpf" sort of thing do tend to be older and white. Prior to Covid they were on whole people who were most insulated from the effects of the actions of his administration. When you don't have the economic and social insulation that years of govt policies that have benefited white boomers it feels a lot less like a place for humor.
posted by Ferreous at 2:13 PM on August 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert

These are all dumb things to be, even ironically.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:42 PM on August 7, 2020

I don't really buy that you can only laugh at something if you are comfortably insulated from it and/or not really outraged by it. I think Trump is a vicious, evil, fascist. I've also always believed that mockery of fascists is one of the best ways to deal with them. Also, while I spend a lot of time being angry at or about Trump, I can't maintain that 24/7/365. It's not somehow more righteous to stay mad all the time and never laugh at a Trump joke. Some young folk may be taking themselves a tad too seriously... or maybe I'm just a Gen Xer afflicted with perma-irony.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:03 PM on August 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

"You have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you're one up on him," he tells Wallace. "It's been one of my lifelong jobs - to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler," says Brooks.

-- Mel Brooks on Anti-Semitism

Ernst Lubitsch and a largely Jewish cast made To Be or Not to Be (1942) during World War II. (Mel Brooks did a remake in 1983.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:22 PM on August 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

Trump Lip-Syncher Sarah Cooper Sets Netflix Special Directed by Natasha Lyonne (Variety, Aug. 12, 2020) “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” will premiere in fall 2020, with Cooper flanked by an array of talent: Natasha Lyonne will direct, and Maya Rudolph will executive produce, along with Danielle Renfrew Behrens and Lyonne through their production company Animal Pictures. Cooper and Paula Pell will also executive produce. The special, described as being “short interviews, sketches” and vignettes, will feature Cooper and guests on the topics of “politics, race, gender, class, and other light subjects.” [...]

Cooper’s “How to Medical” wasn’t her first experience with viral success: In 2014, she published an essay on Medium titled “10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings” that exploded, and she turned into the book “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying.” (She has also written the book “How to be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings.”)
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:31 PM on August 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

I just learned that Sarah Cooper attended the same high school as I -- about 11 years apart.
posted by Hey, Zeus! at 6:50 AM on September 5, 2020