We’ve always lived in a world filled with funny pop songs, but funny pop singers are much harder to come by. Maybe that’s because going for laughs and being taken seriously as an artist don’t often square in our cultural imagination, and maybe that’s why Sabrina Carpenter seems to be inventing a new kind of stardom right now.
Has any singer occupying this stratum of fame ever committed themselves to being funny at all times? The framing matters here. We’re not talking about another Lonely Islander setting jokes to music. We’re talking about a one-woman Abba who’s more concerned with comedy than dancing. It’s the kind of work that requires brains, lungs and guts — something Carpenter proves throughout “Man’s Best Friend,” a new album so unrelenting in its pursuit of laughter, you might not comprehend the significance of her principles until the whole thing’s over and you notice how much your face hurts.
Carpenter has to be smiling just as hard, right? After years of plowing the fields of popland — including an adolescence spent on the Disney Channel fame farm — she finally made herself into a mainstream phenomenon last summer with “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” a pair of winking pop smashes that cleared their own spaces near the summit of a zeitgeist where Taylor Swift and Beyoncé shall never be dethroned. Savvy enough to know she couldn’t be the queen, Carpenter chose to play the clown.
Easier said than done, but you wouldn’t know it after listening to “Man’s Best Friend,” a 12-track album that feels weightless, frictionless, fast and fun. Lyrically, Carpenter’s thesis is that heterosexual American men are hopelessly self-important imbeciles whom she can’t seem to stop falling in love with, and the lower the bar sinks, the smarter her punch lines become. We were all primed back in June with the release of her album-opening lead single, “Manchild,” in which Carpenter informs us that “I like my men all incompetent.” How incompetent? On the very next cut, the disco-pulsed “Tears,” Carpenter describes her arousal at the thought of a lover who possesses both the gumption and the intellect required to assemble a chair from Ikea. Then, during “My Man on Willpower,” that beautiful Poäng putter-togetherer begins to slip through her fingers, growing distant as he embarks on a dim journey of self-discovery, “my slutty pajamas not tempting him in the least,” she sings. Somehow, we’re only three songs into this thing.
Whether the nine tracks that follow get any better — or, really, if anything on this album seems capable of eclipsing “Please Please Please” or “Espresso” — remains tough to say. That’s because Carpenter has made an album that demands to be listened to in full. It follows the arc of a stand-up act, leaving us waiting on the next quip more than the next hook. But we’re still listening for both, of course, and those elegantly interwoven tensions and releases end up feeling like a waggling rope with no knots, no breaks, no digressive ballads describing something Carpenter learned about herself in therapy. These songs are probably the therapy.
Could the music itself be funnier? Not without curdling into something zany. Carpenter’s allergy to being a try-hard is part of what makes us laugh hard. So instead, she allows most of her backing tracks to nestle into that increasingly popular twang-and-jiggle mode that Fleetwood Mac perfected in the 1980s — perhaps to put everything in neutral and let the jokes fly. Jack Antonoff was employed here as a producer, and he’s the guy everybody calls when they want to sound like everybody else. As for Carpenter’s singing, it’s teasing and alert, landing somewhere between Glinda the Good Witch and Nina Persson of the Cardigans singing “Lovefool,” her delicate timbres only making the soft raunch of her zingers land more perfectly.
When pop songs feel this funny, it’s easy to start wondering about the tears of a clown: What kind of pain is our Sabrina concealing behind this bombardment of melodic jokes? It’s true, there are only two moments on “Man’s Best Friend” when Carpenter isn’t expressing romantic and/or sexual disappointment — the self-explanatory “When Did You Get Hot?” and the zesty “House Tour,” in which she sings, “I promise none of this is a metaphor.” No spoilers regarding what’s sung next, but let’s zoom out on that line and take Carpenter at her word. She’s being funny to be funny, and she’s made an absolute feat of it. For those of us already capable of putting a chair together, our next assignment is to learn how to laugh and sing along at the same time.
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