Sarah Cooper Time Machine

Unthinkable with Jay Acunzo

Standup comedian and comedy writer Sarah Cooper's rise to mainstream fame feels inevitable. Looking at her 2020, she was one of the biggest stories in entertainment and the creator economy more broadly.

It started when her nephew turned her onto TikTok, and it's there where she went viral. She filmed herself in her apartment doing lip-sync videos of Donald Trump speeches and media appearances. Her popularity doing these didn't stop at TikTok, either. The surge in fame spilled across social media, attracting the attention and praise of fellow comedians like Mike Birbiglia and Jerry Seinfeld, and landing her profiles and guests spots everywhere from the New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair to CBS Sunday Morning, the Tonight Show, and a guest hosting gig for Jimmy Kimmel.

She was even offered a Netflix special doing sketch comedy, a project called "Everything Is Fine." The struggling standup suddenly found herself shooting her OWN show, featuring an all-star list of cameos, like Aubrey Plaza, Marisa Tomei, Winona Ryder, Ben Stiller, Jon Hamm, Jane Lynch, Megan The Stallion, Maya Rudolph, and Helen Mirren!

And just a few days prior to me recording this, it was announced that CBS purchased a pilot from Sarah Cooper based on her book, How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings.

(Editor's note: In my intro, I said this episode originally aired in 2016, but it was actually 2019. Either way, it was The Before Times, so it's all the same, isn't it?)

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