What happens when Sarah Cooper speaks with her own voice?

Was Donald Trump good at comedy? Comic Lewis Black recently responded to this lingering question with an understandable tone of exhaustion, saying the President is good for comedy like a stroke is good for a nap.

Making fun of President Trump is both difficult (how do you parody someone who already looks like it?) And way too easy, because any joke about the orange man in the White House is laughing, if not a applause break. Too many stand-ups these days are bending over their base. And yet, some comics flourished during the Trump era, as did Sarah Cooper, a breakthrough star whose videos online re-energized the tradition of presidential printing.

Responding to the latest events with the cable news metabolism, she lip-syncs snippets of speeches or interviews with the president of her apartment, in her own clothes, without attempting to emulate her look. She didn’t try to emulate him as much as she did to capture a buffoonish essence, focusing on the times when the juxtaposition between lack of knowledge and confidence was most striking. Her fans range from kids to grandparents, and her success has now led to a brilliant Netflix production, everything is fine (which premiered on Tuesday), a celebrity-rich, intermittently fun sketch show that hangs on a doomsday tale of doom. Cooper plays a morning talk show host who struggles to maintain her smile as the world around her unfolds. Its story which begins as a comedy and ends as a horror.

Directed with a slow-burning terror by Natasha Lyonne, this paranoid production has the feel of a comedic update of Network, and there’s even a nod to that classic movie, but instead of rabid citizens screaming that they’re crazy as hell, Cooper plays a character whose anger is suppressed and who keeps taking it until what she is hiding under her desk.

Everythings Fine is sometimes a conventional daytime TV parody, poking fun at the obligatory cheering of cooking segments and cheesy transitions, like when Cooper introduces a segment with rapper Megan Thee Stallion saying: A lot of us work from home, but some of us home twerk.

The satire gets stranger and stranger as it broadens its scope to include topics like QAnon, police shootings and environmental disaster. Cooper is usurping Trump, sure, but she’s after the political world that led to her success. The show hinges on parody commercials (Jon Hamm playing My Pillow owner selling a Covid cure has a fun Tim and Eric vibe), news interviews like the one with a robot GM played by Ben Stiller, and interludes Documentary simulations, such as a Ken Burns-style documentary on the history of Karens, featuring the voice of Whoopi Goldberg.

Cooper has an acting gift for saying one thing while indicating another; it pulls a lot from a downward facing lip or itchy eye. And this special shows that it can do a lot more than lip-sync; she has a promising future as an actor in television or in the cinema. She is currently develop a series for CBS.

She’s perfect for disasters around her, both inside the show (Wi-Fi turns off, racist white guests ask for her ID) and in the outside world (a meteor is heading towards Earth ). A production guy played by Fred Armisen remains calm, but his ever-changing costume, from masks and helmets to beekeeper costume, tells a different story.

An impressive array of celebrity cameos (Winona Ryder, Helen Mirren, Aubrey Plaza, Connie Chung) surround the new star, who everyone continues to call Sarah Cooper as if she wasn’t first names with anyone yet. Comic book ideas vary wildly in quality and tone, with a few decent but undeveloped ideas like Cooper struggling to do magic close-up during a drive-through.

Everythings Fine often feels like an episode of Saturday Night Live, but at its best, it’s cohesive in stranger, more nightmarish territory. In the final 10 minutes, in the midst of a clouded color palette that evokes a streak of fear from Dario Argento, she does not appear only to be afraid of world events, but paralyzed, trapped. Many will tell. As the recent South Park special and the new Borat, this show makes up a comeback story for the chaos of the pandemic, finding a comedic conspiracy that raises the stakes.

But that larger story still has connective tissue with more streamlined videos from Coopers, and not just because it syncs the President with his wife and daughter. Seen from a certain angle, becoming famous for playing the voice of Donald Trump is its own kind of trap. Cooper draws attention to this aspect of body theft in a subplot in which she responds to the producers in the Control Booth who say they were looking for a non-threatening black anchor. When my parents called me Sarah, she says, I feel like a white woman has settled into my body and gentrified my whole personality.

There’s another short, fun sketch that imagines a version of Get Out set in Mar-a-Lago that plays on similar themes. But Jordan Peele made a horror film whose scares were comedy; Coopers Show is a comedy that gets so dark that it can’t go anywhere except horror.

Part of the success of its videos is due to their timeliness, but this special doesn’t riff on the latest ridiculous speech as much as it does trying to create a fictional world. In the process, some of the little pleasures of Coopers’ videos were lost: his ear for language nonsense, the comedy of subtext. While her comedy once sliced ​​her subject with a scalpel, now, on a larger stage, she resorts to a ram.

The comedy of the past four years has generally mirrored politics, becoming more brutal, more polarized, fragmented. Compared to social media comics and late-night TV hosts, stand-ups on Netflix specials over the past four years have avoided Trump. The most acclaimed show of last year, Dave Chappelles Sticks and Stones, was not targeting the president but his favorite targets: political correctness and the cancellation of culture.

Cooper actually seems to reflect the zeitgeist more than most of the specials on the streaming service. Even though its jokes are hit and miss, Everythings Fine, the latest pre-election release of Netflix comedy, channels the cultural vibe well. Just check out the bestseller list to see an endless appetite for material on Donald Trump. Cooper takes advantage of this again, all the while suggesting that this regular diet is driving us crazy.