Early career Cooper began performing stand-up comedy in Atlanta while she was working as a visual designer at
Yahoo! Later, while she was a
user experience designer for
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, She has said that she would analyze
Stephen Colbert's monologues from
The Colbert Report to understand what made them humorous. In 2014, she wrote a blog post called "10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings" that went viral with five million views. Her "colouring and activity book",
Draw What Success Looks Like, was published in the same month. Her third book, ''How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings
, was published on October 30, 2018. It is subtitled "Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women", and contains satirical advice for women such as "Pepper your emails with exclamation marks and emojis.... Your lack of efficient communication will make you seem more approachable." Her books were not commercially successful. Her first viral satire, titled "How to Medical", features her lip-syncing a minute of audio from the April 23 press briefing during which Trump suggested that shining light into the body and injecting disinfectant would be an effective method for treating the coronavirus. She subsequently produced several other viral videos based on the same premise. By late October 2020, "How to Medical" had received over 24 million views across Twitter and TikTok. Cooper also redistributed her "How to Bible" TikTok video using her Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts, achieving a combined total of 16 million views by the end of 2020. The Boston Globe'' remarked that Cooper's videos are also noted as being examples of extremely economical political satire since they are structured around an unedited voice clip of a politician speaking. This extremely minimalistic comedic approach, which includes neither a script nor an audience, was described as an innovative response to the limitations that comedians faced during COVID-19 lockdowns. Cooper lip-synced Trump talking about
mail-in ballots, for a video played during the
2020 Democratic National Convention. She was named Digital Creator of the Year by
Adweek,
Television In the wake of the popularity of her TikTok videos, Cooper was invited to appear on ''
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell and The Ellen DeGeneres Show''. In October 2020, the
Netflix special ''
Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine'' was released, produced by
Maya Rudolph and directed by
Natasha Lyonne. It features Cooper as the host of a fictional morning news program. The show is structured around spoofs of news segments, interviews, and commercials, and it incorporates a series of
sketches featuring appearances from celebrities including
Jon Hamm,
Whoopi Goldberg,
Helen Mirren,
Ben Stiller, and
Marisa Tomei. Cooper's character is a news anchor who struggles to retain her sanity and positive attitude despite the dramatic upheaval that she is reporting on, which is a commentary on the experience of observing the political, economic, and pandemic-related disruptions throughout the world in 2020 (as is the sarcasm of the title, ''Everything's Fine
). A New York Times review compared Everything's Fine
favorably to the parody news show Saturday Night Live'', arguing that Cooper captured the zeitgeist of the news experience in 2020 more successfully than many other contemporary satires, but also asserted that "the comic ideas vary wildly in quality" with jokes that "are hit and miss". It was announced in August 2020 that Cooper and
Cindy Chupack would be producing a comedy show for
CBS based on ''How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings
. The pilot was not picked up to series. Cooper was listed as one of the "Breakout Stars" of 2020 by Vogue
and The New York Times'', and as one of five Breakthrough Entertainers of 2020 by the
Associated Press. In August 2021,
Bleecker Street and
Stage 6 Films picked up the worldwide rights to
James Ponsoldt's coming of age film
Summering, starring Cooper alongside
Megan Mullally. On October 3, 2023, Cooper published her memoir
Foolish: Tales of Assimilation, Determination, and Humiliation. ==Personal life==