Saturday night might get dark on a dark Saturday night on Manhattan’s Lower East Side last month, but Sabrina Brier wore a rhinestone necklace and a strapless plaid pantsuit at a prestigious The stage for Caveat’s Basement Comedy Club sparkled and was warming up the crowd.
“You’re the butter and I’m the microwave,” she announced.
That particular joke goes by quickly, but the metaphor hangs in the balance. Ms. Brier, 28, has found instant success on current social media platform TikTok after a few years of quiet work in show business.With over 400,000 followers and many more who watch, “like” and share her videos, which mostly parody the lives of young women with a certain privilege and shaky confidence, amidst the excitement and excitement of the city Teetering between the reassuring comforts of the suburbs. (“Did you see this corner? It’s perfect for a pumpkin,” she declared on one show About Recycling Fall, the so-called “essential” white women’s favorite season. “Don’t blame I, blame the architect! “)
Ms. Brier specializes in point-of-view, or POV, videos of confronting relatable but often obnoxious characters with subtle sneers, cheerful bouncy bodies and arches delivering intergenerational catchphrases like “Kill, Queen” and “I’ve Got You”, repeated often for effect.She’s been messing around lately Prepare With Me (GR.WM) genre This has women across America slathering makeup on their faces, stuffing themselves with beauty products and oversharing in equal measure.
That GR.WM’s POV: “That girl who bullied you in high school is trying to be an influencer.”
In a five-part series on “Extremely Passive-Aggressive Roommates,” Ms. Brier pretend Don’t mind taking out the trash when it’s not her day; implement The rule that no one should come over at night on weekdays; complain About her roommate coming home at 3:27am; strong arms that roommate renews the lease, and welcome “Public space” guests. (The first three videos have each been viewed millions of times.) Ms. Brier’s own real-life roommate, ICU nurse Alice Duchen, is often behind the camera, deadpan.
The two women live in Greenwich Village, near the rack of CitiBikes (Ms. Brier also sent CitiBike Poser who ostentatiously yelled “On your left!”), in a small two-bedroom apartment. She’s on a lower floor than her character in one of her most popular videos, breathlessly urging visitors to climb six flights of stairs in a building she’s trying to argue is a luxury: “It’s going to be Well worth it! Hurry up!”
Eleven days before the Caveat comedy show, Ms. Brier sat in the dining area of her apartment with a plate of untouched cookies in front of her, next to a set of drawings by her grandmother telling her origin story.
Her mother, Susan Cinoman, is a playwright currently working on A feminist retelling of the Arthurian legend Divorced Ms. Brier’s father (cardiologist) when she was 5 years old. “Very gracious,” Ms. Brier said. “It’s not a big show.”
She has an older sister, Gabrielle, who is now a producer, and they became obsessed with the Disney Channel as kids, staging a modern-day version of “Cinderella”—”except for the ball, it was like a Britney Spears concert ”—later “romance-com girlie movies” like “Clueless” and “Mean Girls.”
Ms. Brier was in sixth grade when she first got a phone, a Verizon Chocolate. “We’re the AIM generation,” she says, never dreaming that the mobile phone would one day be the gateway to everything.She attended Amity High School where she Got first place In Shakespeare’s competition, with her monologue from “The Taming of the Shrew,” she wasn’t sure comedy was her winning strategy. “In this case, the boys have to have a personality, right? The boys are the clowns of the class.” She took it easy at Smith College, an all-girls liberal arts college where she majored in drama and attended Impromptu lessons.
“It was always easy to see that she was a showman,” Ms. Sinoman said by phone. “She’s not an extrovert per se, but half of Sabrina’s been looking out the window. Some other reality is hitting the reality that we’re with her.”
After graduating, Ms. Brier worked in talent management for two years before finding an assistant job in the writing room of the ABC drama “For Life,” about a wrongly convicted man who becomes a prison lawyer to elute The story of guilt. “I’m obsessed with anything that makes me cry,” Ms Brier said. “There’s a sad girl inside every comedian, and that’s definitely me.”
One season later, Covid came. Restless during the quarantine, she began posting videos on Instagram, one of which was picked up by the popular sports blog Barstool. But this was before the scroll. “It’s going to be a bit blurry, it’s not translated, I don’t understand it, it feels like old,’ she said. Then she threw some on TikTok, especially when she naively referred to New York’s Houston Street as Hew-ston, pronounced How-ston. Boom.
As Ms. Brier expanded her work from single-note New York-Connecticut transplants to complex friendship jazz, especially female friendships, she began to gain recognition in restaurants and sidewalks.Platform princess Dixie D’Amelio names her account favorite to follow. Model Emily Ratajkowski used Ms. Brier’s voice-over in a video about “Being Perceived.” Playwright Jeremy O. Harris included her in his “Coronavirus Mixtape” post, Videos and memes posted by Mr Harris during the lockdown.
Ms. Brier’s viral reputation has drawn the attention of brands that pay her to write comics about their products, how she now makes a living. The girl who once made a video calling herself “the ultimate subway girl” but couldn’t swipe a MetroCard is now being hired to sell Subway sandwiches. (Other sponsorships include Bumble, the board game Uno and mirrored phone cases.)
But she dreams of owning and hosting her own TV show.In May, she will take on the role as her character in Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn — a neighborhood where this role might be hard to find. Now represented by the Creative Arts Agency, Ms. Brier is also auditioning for other roles.
After all, you still need ambition and algorithms in this small town.
“People would say, ‘Wow, this is all happening,'” Ms Brier said. “And I thought, ‘This is how I’m trying to get them to work it out. It’s not random.'”
