PhD Student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies | University of California, Berkeley

Who will Present:

How to Viral: Sarah Cooper’s Quiet Humor in the Trump Era

Respondent: Tina Post, Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature/TAPS, University of Chicago

Wednesday, November 17,
4:30 – 6:00 PM CT
Logan Center Room 028 and over Zoom

Please register for the workshop HERE. Dahlia Nayar will deliver her paper at the workshop.

We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu).

ABSTRACT: This work-in-progress paper examines the comedic posts on social media by Sarah Cooper during the presidency of Donald Trump (No. 45) and onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. I consider how Cooper’s performances might demonstrate the “deterritorializing capacity of minoritarian performance” (Chambers-Letson, After the Party). Cooper’s home videos are in the “POV” style: one-woman skits of herself lip synching to excerpts of No. 45’s interviews, press comments, and impromptu responses, and the public. Casting herself, a Jamaican American woman, and using everyday household objects in her domestic space, whilst deftly lip synching to the president’s words, Cooper’s performances simultaneously re-interpret, contrast, mock, and offer scathing critique of both No. 45 and the white male capitalist patriarchy at large.

Using only No. 45’s voice and never her own, Cooper’s performances emphasize gestures and facial expressions in all of her “characters”, effectively reinterpreting and exposing the irrationality, ill logic, hypocrisies, confusion, flaws, and insecurity beneath the veneer of No. 45’s bumbling interview responses. Cooper’s choices illuminate lesser acknowledged aspects of Quiet: the unique power of withholding and the ability of this withholding to critique and expose. Quiet manifests and operates in a multitude of unexpected ways: revealing, muting, and thus amplifying, contradicting, and disrupting. Quiet defies its own containment as any one particular thing.

Through creating a particular space that generates its own power without an overt verbalized critique that fights against, objects or speaks back to hegemonic forces, how does the Quiet in Cooper’s humor evade through stripping away, mirroring, and revealing? On the other hand, to what degree is Cooper’s Quiet attributable to the platform of TikTok which spurred the virality of lip syncing posts in general? How does Cooper’s Quiet humor enact the possibility of taking “flight along creative lines of escape,” into a dimension of worldmaking linked to survival?

BIO: Dahlia Nayar is a PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Theater, Dance and Performance Studies program. Her research focuses on minoritarian multimedia and embodied performances of Quiet. Dahlia holds an MFA in Dance/Choreography from Hollins University and has toured and performed throughout the USA and internationally. Dahlia is a recipient of the Jacob Javits Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Choreography, and the National Dance Project Touring Award.

**Following this workshop, participants are encouraged to attend Gimme the Light Comedy Show at The Hideout featuring LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC comedians.