In a brilliant display of how a different platform could offer her work new possibilities, she shot a scene with Helen Mirren in which the two re-created the 2005 audio of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush. Lip-syncing could seem like a simple gag, yet with Cooper it became high art-a fact that Cooper proved when she took her work to Netflix for a special called Everything’s Fine. As she described it in an interview with Stephen Colbert, if you couldn’t see Trump’s BS when you watched him speaking, then watching her say it would work to expose his BS. Removing his physicality by disembodying his voice was an effort to make him more real. By only reprising his words, devoid of his precise choreographed physicality, Cooper aimed to make it easier to return representational gravitas to the Trump spectacle. The idea was to create sufficient representational space to make it easier to truly see Trump.
As she described it, she wasn’t trying to do an impersonation or an impression she was “interpreting” Trump for the “emotionally blind.” Her reembodiment of Trump with actual sound bites of him talking had a deliberate communicative purpose. Cooper literally represented (almost) everything Trump hated-as a female immigrant of color-which added even greater representational force to her work. The fact that Cooper did this performance as a female, Jamaican-American comedian cleverly passing judgement on a callous moron added an incisive layer to her impersonations that was aesthetically innovative. Even more important, having a lesser-known performer like Rainbow skewer a powerful figure like Trump was inherently ironic in ways that celebrity impersonations like those of Baldwin or Fallon could never be. Having an openly gay performer mockingly chide Trump through show tunes on such a popular site offered the novel representational aesthetics required to expose the dangerous, delusional realities of Trump. The musical parodies of Trump posted by Randy Rainbow on YouTube, for instance, regularly attacked Trump’s character in a tone that was both disturbed and admonishing. Even though Alec Baldwin’s version of Trump on SNL was a powerful satirical intervention, largely due to the fact that Trump was so regularly bothered by it that it offered a spectacle of his insecurities, some of the best Trump mockery came from outside of the professional-celebrity class.
It’s not just that Fallon’s Trump fell flat it was also that the aesthetic space within which he, as a white, hetero, male, celebrity, presented his version of Trump on a late-night network comedy show was ill-equipped to offer the sort of creative dissonance necessary for representational impact. But Trump complicated irony because he embodied all three types at the same time. Recall that irony has three dominant modes: (1) situational irony, where what is expected to happen doesn’t happen or where reality doesn’t make sense, as, for example, when the least-qualified person wins an election (2) dramatic irony, where the audience knows more about the situation than the characters, as takes place famously at the end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (3) rhetorical irony, or what I prefer to call creative irony, since it may not only be expressed rhetorically, where an artist or comedian or everyday person represents something in one way but actually means something else. If satire is always an ironic representation, then under Trump it became an ironic representation of an ironic representation. In fact, the most significant Trump effect on satire was to produce ironic irony. Yet, the effect was not the end of irony but, rather, a reinvention of satire’s primary mode of representational defiance. This essay explores two key examples of this new satirical aesthetic, Sarah Cooper’s interpretations of Trump and Jimmy Kimmel’s use of satire to defend democracy. Satirical irony of Trump was not a matter of irony everywhere or ironic post-truthiness when Trump satire was at its best, it worked in two competing, yet intertwined, representational directions because it was at once a return to sincerely using irony to reveal the truth while also using irony to reveal that reality had become grotesquely and ironically absurd. Because Trump was both absurd and terrifying, because he was both parody and credible threat, he created a unique situation for satirists, one where many of the common tools they carry in their comedic toolkit didn’t work. It argues that the ironic complexities of the Trump figure itself created an unusual situation for satire, one which required it to adapt and change in novel ways. This essay analyzes how the presidency of Donald Trump presented a challenge to satirists.