Sarah Cooper is our Groucho Marx
Or, the art of reinvention
The difference between true wit and a memorized joke is resilience. Just about anyone can seem witty in a controlled environment, but what happens when that environment changes? Can you change faster?
Sarah Cooper has done just that. She began doing satirical lip-sync impressions of the U.S. President on social media in April, and as he upped the ante, she kept pace. This culminated in “How to Medical”, which amassed more than 20 million views. That led to her Netflix special Everything’s Fine, which will feature “short interviews, sketches, and more shenanigans” and comes out later this fall.
So far, so internet, right? Like the time that guy who tweeted his dad’s complaints got a CBS sitcom? Well, no. The difference is that Cooper is a genuine wit, as evidenced by both how she made her viral videos and what she did before.
How many jokes about the current U.S. president have been made? How many legions of impersonators clog the tubes of the internet? And to what effect? It calls to mind Peter Cook’s line about “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.” And yet Cooper was able to break through. We didn’t need wigs and facepaint; we needed to transport his words to reality. As she says, “I’m not trying to be him. I’m wondering what it would be like if [he] were me.”
And consider Cooper’s career before these impersonations: As a user-experience designer at Google, she helped create Google Docs. She left the tech giant to pursue standup comedy after her blogpost “Ten Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” went viral way back in 2014. She spun that into two bestselling books and devoted her website to tongue-in-cheek office advice.
The lesson here isn’t that a successful person keeps succeeding in different eras and formats, because the world is full of proof that’s not true. Instead, it’s that only a true wit, someone who can cleverly adapt to a world in flux, has a shot at reinvention.
Which is where Groucho Marx comes in. The moustachioed comedian was a star of vaudeville, cinema, radio, and finally television — a progression roughly equivalent to our era’s move from dial-up to TikTok. At every stage, he was considered yesterday’s man. New media required new talent, after all.
After his film career had sputtered out in the late 1940s, Groucho started doing the occasional radio spot, largely thanks to favours from friends. While bantering with Bob Hope during one of those spots, he went so wonderfully, deliriously off script that a TV producer in the audience offered him the chance to host a quiz show. His initial reaction, as recorded in his memoir Groucho and Me, was smug disdain:
Here I had just done a brilliant five-minute spot with one of America’s great comedians, and before me stood this rather venal-looking sneak, offering me a golden chance to disappear permanently from show business. In high dudgeon I proudly stalked away to my dressing room near the boiler room in the cellar.
But the TV producer convinced him that “the quiz part would be just a device for you to engage in conversation with a lot of strange people and interrogate them about their lives and their loves.” Groucho came around, and the result was You Bet Your Life, a show that stayed on air for decades and introduced him to a whole new generation of fans.
Sarah Cooper, like Groucho Marx, reinvented herself for a new medium. She may well do it again. As for how to do it, this is Groucho’s advice:
The success of the show proves what I’ve always maintained. Talent isn’t enough. You have to be lucky. I think if I had my choice of one, I would choose luck. ... And I was lucky to get involved in the kind of show that just seemed to fit my particular talent, small or large as it may be.
Quick quip; lightning
“Television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.”
— Various wags developed this line over the years, as detailed in this Quote Investigator entry. Let’s give credit to Goodman Ace, as he used it in a letter to Groucho himself and claimed that TV stood for “terrible vaudeville.”
Link link, nudge nudge
“I always think that the difference between a novel and real life is the difference between a woman’s shoe and a foot. The shoe, with the stiletto heel and the curved sole and the chisel arrangement at the front, really doesn’t look anything like a foot. Life is the graceless trotter down there at the far end of your leg. It’s really clunky.”
— Martin Amis expounding on heels, Hitch, and himself in conversation with Salman Rushdie in Interview. (h/t The Browser)
“This product manager got up and drew a Venn diagram, and this Venn diagram made absolutely no sense. And I thought for sure somebody was going to say, ‘You know what? You’re wasting time, this has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.’ But instead, everybody was like, “No, no, no. Make this circle a little bigger, make this one a little smaller. Let’s change the labels.”
— Sarah Cooper, explaining how her earlier incarnation came to be on a 2018 podcast. On that subject, here’s Chip Zdarsky’s proven formula for success:
That was Issue No. 64 of GWQ, the graceless trotter of a venal-looking sneak if ever there was one. I included the Groucho parts in Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, and now I’ve reinvented them for a newsletter on reinvention because I never meta anecdote I couldn’t recycle. I’ve stuck to a policy of never mentioning the U.S. president by name in this newsletter as a clever, principled way to keep readership down. On that note, do tap the ♥️ below on your way out.