'People still need to laugh': how lipsyncing spoofs saved lockdown

In the TikTok videos going viral across social media, the voices are familiar: a rambling presidential whine, or a patronising prime minister. But the people apparently speaking are altogether – and hilariously – different.

In uncannily calibrated lipsyncs, Donald Trump is shown as a hectoring schoolteacher or drunken clubgoer, while Boris Johnson reads a bedtime story to a petulant Theresa May.

As unsettling as the effect may be, the videos are enormously popular – and the women behind them are at the forefront of a boom in self-produced political comedy on both sides of the Atlantic, highlighting the limits to our leaders’ authority by making them look ridiculous.

“I look at it as taking off the emperor’s clothes,” explains Sarah Cooper, the US comedian behind a series of Trump videos highlighted by the Guardian earlier this week. “I’ve basically taken away the podium and the suit and the people behind him nodding … That’s why it highlights how ridiculous his words are.”

In the UK, after lockdown was renewed last Sunday, the actor and voice artist Meggie Foster presented Boris Johson as reading a bedtime story (revealed to be George Orwell’s 1984) to May, representing the British public reacting with dismay to the news that they would be stuck at home for the foreseeable future.

Foster has also delved into the pre-lockdown era to recreate a sharply personal political disagreement between the Labour MPs Caroline Flint and Emily Thornberry as a teenage bust-up.

In the US, Trump’s characterisation of Covid-19 as a “germ that has gotten so brilliant … [people] end up dying from problems”, in mid-April, caught Kylie Scott’s attention. “I was like, ‘He sounds wasted’,” says the 26-year-old film student from California. The clip of her lipsyncing Trump’s quasi-scientific ramblings with a glass in hand, apparently mid-drunken lecture at a nightclub, racked up 1.2m views on TikTok alone.

“Drunk in the club after Covid” was Scott’s first foray into comedy. Her subsequent “#DrunkTrump” videos – heaping slurred blessings on “the Palestinians” with a drooping pizza slice; giving the glad-eye over a clip of the president praising Elton John’s “organ” (“flirting in the club”) – have also racked up six-figure views.

People are more tuned into politics now than they were pre-Covid, says Scott – and desperate for light relief. “It’s hard to wrap our head around the fact that this is reality: that these aren’t things being said by a drunk person in the club, that this is someone leading our country. It also makes it bearable, to be able to laugh about it for a second.”

Trump – who would, presumably, particularly hate being presented as a woman – is almost beyond being satirised, having made reality unbelievable, says Cooper, 35, whose mostly presidential lipsyncs have been widely praised. “You don’t want to get into the realm of fake news by making something up – the beauty of this is I’m taking his exact soundbite.”

Her first clip, performing Trump’s suggestion of sunlight and disinfectant as potential coronavirus cures with a dead-eyed stare, was posted on Twitter within three hours of the press conference and went past 15m views. “A lot of people saw my parody before they saw the real thing.”

While the lipsyncers have hit on something particularly arresting with clips that so sharply cut through their subjects’ gravitas, they are far from the only female comedians capitalising on the age of pandemic politics – and on social media’s natural affinity with home-made content.

For many in the UK, Cara Saccomando neatly summed up the official advice: dressed half in her work uniform, half in pyjamas, stepping in and out of her house as the comedian Matt Lucas’s send-up of Boris Johnson repeats “don’t go to work. Go to work”. Saccomando, a transport worker and model in Sheffield, posted the clip on social video platform TikTok; within two days it had been viewed nearly 2m times.

Not all of the commentary has been critical. Abbie Chatfield, a runner-up in the TV show The Bachelor, posted a video of herself lovingly stroking a picture of the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern; the Kiwi comedian Melanie Bracewell gained a following for her TikTok takes on Ardern during lockdown; while Laura Daniel expressed her “strictly professional” desire for the New Zealand director-general in a saucy music video. (The former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s famous “misogyny” speech was also given a glambot twist for TikTok’s #bosschallenge.)

Lipsyncing is definitely having its moment. For the 28-year-old character actor and comedian Maria DeCotis, the motivation is to highlight the moments of humanity that have emerged during the pandemic, such as New York governor Andrew Cuomo finding the “silver lining” of social distancing in spending more time with his 22-year-old daughter.

Enacted by DeCotis, a furiously chain-smoking Cuomo is haunted by the thought of losing his “baby” daughter to her deadbeat boyfriend. The high-concept clip has had 1.2m views on Twitter and attention from Stephen Colbert and Alec Baldwin.

DeCotis had been “riveted” by the governor’s “mini-breakdown” during a press briefing last month. “I’m not really commenting on his politics. It’s more this human moment he had in this international crisis.”

Her aim is to entertain, not score political points, she says. “If I poke fun at this, maybe we can all relax a little and breathe.” The Cuomo clips have given DeCotis new purpose: “I was feeling, ‘Why should I even get up? No one needs anything from me’. But people still need to laugh.”