It was a dark Saturday night last month on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Saturday nights can get very dark, but Sabrina Brier, in a beaded necklace and strapless plaid pantsuit, was resplendent in the setting of a basement comedy club called the Caveat heating up the atmosphere. crew.
“You are the butter, I am the microwave,” he announced.
That particular joke passed quickly, but the metaphor hung in the air. After a few years sweating in the background of showbiz, 28-year-old Ms. Brier found instant success on the social media platform of the day, TikTok. She has more than 400,000 followers and many more fans who watch, like and share her videos, which mostly parody the life of a young woman with some privileges and erratic self-confidence wavering between the excitement of the city and the calming comforts of the suburbs. . (“See this corner? Perfect for a pumpkin,” she declared in a on recovery from the fall, the supposed favorite season of “basic” white women. “Do not blame meblame the architect!”)
Ms. Brier specializes in point-of-view, or POV, videos that confront relatable, often obnoxious characters with a subtle grin, a gleefully rubbery body, and an arching delivery of generational catchphrases like “kill, queen” and “Te I have”, often repeated. to impress. She recently faked the Get ready with me (GR.WM) genre that has women all over America slathering makeup on their faces, buying beauty products, and oversharing in equal measure.
POV of that GR.WM: “the girl who bullied you in high school is trying to be an influencer.”
In a five-part series on the “extremely passive and aggressive roommate,” Ms. Brier pretend not worrying about taking out the trash when it’s not your day; make accomplish a rule about not having guests on weekdays; he complains about his roommate coming home at 3:27 am; strong arms that roommate to renew their lease and then Give the welcome a guest to the “common space”. (Each of the first three videos has been viewed millions of times.) Ms. Brier’s own real-life roommate, Alice Duchen, an ICU nurse, is often behind the camera, expressionless.
The two women live in Greenwich Village, near a CitiBikes rack (Ms. Brier has also sent the CitiBike pose who ostentatiously bleats “to your left!”), in a small two-room apartment without elevator. She’s on a lower floor than the character she plays in one of her most popular videos, who breathlessly urges a visitor up six flights of stairs in a building she tries to argue is luxurious: “It’ll do!” the sorrow! Come on!”
Eleven days before the Caveat comedy show, Brier sat in the dining room of her apartment in front of a plate of untouched cookies, beneath a collection of her paternal grandmother’s paintings, and recounted her origin story.
His mother, Susan Cinoman, is a playwright currently working at a feminist retelling of the legend of King Arthur who divorced Ms. Brier’s father, a cardiologist, when she was 5 years old. “Very cordial,” Ms. Brier said. “It’s not a big drama.”
She has an older sister, Gabrielle, now a producer, and they were obsessed with the Disney Channel when they were little, presenting a modern “Cinderella,” “except instead of the dance, it’s like a Britney Spears concert,” and later “rom- com girlie movies” such as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls”.
Ms. Brier was in the sixth grade when she first got a phone, the Verizon Chocolate. “We were the AIM generation,” she said, never dreaming that a phone could one day be a portal to everything. She attended Amity High School, where won first place in a Shakespearean competition with a monologue from “The Taming of the Shrew,” she wasn’t sure comedy was her winning strategy. “It was a thing where the guys were the ones with the personality, right? The boys were the class clowns.” She relaxed at Smith College, a women’s liberal arts college, where she majored in theater and took improv classes.
“It was always easy to identify her as someone performative,” Cinoman said by phone. “She wasn’t an extrovert per se, but half of Sabrina was looking out the window at all times. Another set of realities affected the one that we were all with her”.
After graduation, Ms. Brier worked in talent management for two years and then landed a job as an assistant in the writers’ room on “For Life,” an ABC drama about a wrongfully convicted man who becomes a lawyer for the prison to exonerate. “I’m a fiend for anything that makes me cry,” Ms. Brier said. “Inside every comedian is a sad girl, and that’s definitely me.”
After a season, the Covid arrived. Restless in her quarantine, she began posting videos on Instagram, one of which was picked up by Barstool, the popular sports blog. But this was before Reels. “It would be a little blurry, and it wouldn’t translate, and I wouldn’t understand it, and I felt old,” she said. She then released a few on TikTok, notably one in which she naively falsely referred to Houston Street in New York, which is pronounced How-ston, like Hew-ston. Boom.
As Ms. Brier expanded her work from the single note of a New York Connecticut transplant to the complicated jazz of friendship, especially female friendship, she began to be recognized in restaurants and on sidewalks. Dixie D’Amelio, a platform princess, named her account a favorite to follow. Model Emily Ratajkowski used Ms. Brier’s voiceover for a video about being “perceived.” Playwright Jeremy O. Harris included her in his posts “Coronavirus Mixtape,” carousels of videos and memes Mr. Harris posted during lockdown.
Ms. Brier’s viral fame has caught the attention of brands who pay her to write comic strip snippets featuring their products, how she now makes a living. The girl who once made a video about being “the LAST girl on the subway” who couldn’t get past her MetroCard is now being hired to sell Subway sandwiches. (Other endorsements include Bumble, Uno the board game, and mirrored cell phone cases.)
But he dreams of owning and directing his own television show. In May, she will perform two nights as her character in Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood the character would likely have a hard time finding. Now represented by Creative Arts Agency, Ms. Brier is also auditioning for other roles.
In this city, after all, you still need ambition as well as an algorithm.
“People say, ‘Wow, this is all happening,’” Brier said. “And I’m like, ‘This is just things working the way I was trying to make them work.’ It’s not random.’”
