Sarah Cooper is sharp. She demonstrates great economy and effectiveness in asides and laugh lines, has terrific cultural references, and prefers sarcastic understatement to bludgeoning. I reviewed her first two books and said things like I wished my razor was this sharp. So I looked forward to this new effort, called Foolish. It is totally different; it’s her autobiography. It is also quite an unexpected ride.

The book is divided into three sections: Assimilation, Determination and Humiliation. But really, all three are dominated by humiliation. It is all self-inflicted humiliation, whatever she does. Cooper stumbles. A lot. Her main issue is flat out laziness. This is not my opinion; she calls herself lazy (and then proves it) at least half a dozen times in the book. So, for example while she really wanted to be a singer, she took no lessons, did not practice, and based her entire future singing career on the art of lip-synching. For auditions, she determined that if she was the loudest, she would win. She was actually hurt and angry every year in high school when the music teacher did not select her for the choir. Yet she did absolutely nothing to alter that outcome in the year she had until his next selection. Instead, she tried to make an impression on the teacher in other ways, such as slapping him on the butt in public. She is incensed that he was later convicted of pedophilia, because “Mr. Joynes was a pedophile and he still didn’t like me?”

She was a self-proclaimed teacher’s pet, the goody-goody, annoying little pain. Nonetheless, she had a circle of friends and a diary filled with notes on potential boyfriends and who was breaking up with whom. Perfectly normal. She doesn’t own up to being deprived in any way. The laziness was all on her.

Most critically, she did not work on her marriages. Rather than look at what she could do to save her last marriage, the couple was fired by three different therapists who gave up on them. They fought bitterly over the most trivial things, that were impassable mountain ranges to her. She sort of sees that, as she explains an online divorce questionnaire she took, where her husband scored so well, the questionnaire said “Wait – what? You mean he has a great job and he cooks?” And immediately advises her to take him to bed and perform a nice favor. But instead, she divorced him.

Her laziness shows up in everything she touches. She loves to write, but she doesn’t seem to have the passion or the self-discipline to invest much in her comedy career and knowledge. In the book, she drops laugh lines that she should have attributed to other comics, but I don’t think she even knows they’re not original. When she meets Jerry Seinfeld, she decides the only way to engage him in conversation is to give him a backhanded sarcastic compliment like he has never had before. It falls flat because she didn’t plan a comeback to his predictable if not inevitable response. What she should have done was just a little research, to find out what comedians inspire him, and ask him about them, adding her own knowledge in the course of the discussion to demonstrate her qualifications as a potential close colleague. But Cooper doesn’t think that way. So she stumbles some more.

She doesn’t want children. They would get in the way of her writing, she says. Crimp her style. She was pregnant twice. She had an abortion the first time and a miscarriage the second, and glad and relieved about it. She does not extend herself to sharing, at least not according to her autobiography.

The book is remarkable because the heroine is portrayed as a lazy, self-centered, selfish spoiled brat. And this is an autobiography, mind you. From what she remembers, Cooper has apparently never done anything nice, generous or helpful for anyone. She wants fame and money, and for some reason, it has to come to her. If she doesn’t get it right away, she moves on – from singing to acting, to standup comedy, to writing. It is a most unusual autobiography. And I have to keep saying that lest you think I am just being hypercritical.

Between marriages, there is a long, cringeworthy section on various creeps she bedded down with, mostly courtesy of match.com. She, like all women (she claims), went for tall men with a lot of great hair. That never seemed to work very well outside the bedroom. Not to put too fine a point on it, she declares: “I’ve had more white guys inside me than a GameStop in the ’90s.” Bravo. I guess.

She is also the world’s worst roommate. She details all kinds of inconsiderate and selfish acts in a list of apartments she has shared, apologizing to her former roommates by name for absolutely classic abysmal behavior. More cringe. She was the roommate from hell, by her own reckoning.

Cooper’s writing though, is sparkling. She will tell a story and jump off the page to question the reader to see it her way. She will mock herself and her predicaments. She is full of sarcasm and irony, making for a very different kind of storytelling, very self-aware and funny at her own expense. Just to make sure readers get it, nearly 160 pages in she actually says: “I don’t know if you noticed this about me, but I love sarcasm and irony.” She really ought to give her fans some credit.

She is very good at the construction of jokes. She will effortlessly build to a laugh line in a story, and then circle back to it for an even bigger laugh, several times for even more laughs and then again as much as 200 pages later. In other words, 1) she is worth reading carefully, 2) she understands humor, and 3) she is really easy to read.

She attributes a lot of her comedic skills to getting high, which she apparently does a lot. In marijuana she has found that she perceives subtext as she never does when straight. She suddenly understands what is really behind what is being said, with crystal clarity. She calls it extreme listening skills, but it often seems missing as she bounces from bed to bed.

At the age of 45, she is still stage struck. She is blown away by the people she worked with on her Netflix special, and the Seinfeld film she was cast in. Right down to the hair and makeup people, she gushes and name drops, with an all caps I KNOW.

Her life is full of classically if not sitcomy wrong moves, and readers might question how much of it is just made up for laughs. For a while I thought the book was creating this miserable character, like Jack Benny being a cheapskate or Tommy Smothers being a moron, but that’s not it. She names names, offers apologies, and the book is listed under autobiography and not fiction. So I’m guessing it is all more true than not.

Her big break came from TikTok and twitter, where she posted lip-syncs to insane Trump rants, soaring from 60,000 followers to two million, including a number of celebrities she is still keen to brag about. She suddenly became an influencer – in things entertainment. She got her Netflix special, was invited to talk shows and even asked to substitute host for Jimmy Kimmel. So perhaps she has made it. Perhaps she is the major success she has always wanted to be. And yet, the book gives the impression she is still on the outside, looking in.

She can now say of those Trump videos: “They were about my (our) frustration with a culture of entitlement and bullshit that valued the egos of rich (white) men over facts and accountability.” It is a measure of her intellect that Foolish can combine both perspective and cringe and be delightfully funny about it all.

It is a wonderfully entertaining read, done with thought and skill, even if it seems edited by her therapist.

David Wineberg ( )