<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve always lived in a world filled with funny pop songs, but funny pop singers are much harder to come by. Maybe that\u2019s because going for laughs and being taken seriously as an artist<\/i> don\u2019t often square in our cultural imagination, and maybe that\u2019s why Sabrina Carpenter seems to be inventing a new kind of stardom right now.<\/p>\n
Has any singer occupying this stratum of fame ever committed themselves to being funny at all times? The framing matters here. We\u2019re not talking about another Lonely Islander setting jokes to music. We\u2019re talking about a one-woman Abba who\u2019s more concerned with comedy than dancing. It\u2019s the kind of work that requires brains, lungs and guts \u2014 something Carpenter proves throughout \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d a new album so unrelenting in its pursuit of laughter, you might not comprehend the significance of her principles until the whole thing\u2019s over and you notice how much your face hurts.<\/p>\n
Carpenter has to be smiling just as hard, right? After years of plowing the fields of popland \u2014 including an adolescence spent on the Disney Channel fame farm \u2014 she finally made herself into a mainstream phenomenon last summer with \u201cEspresso<\/a>\u201d and \u201cPlease Please Please<\/a>,\u201d a pair of winking pop smashes that cleared their own spaces near the summit of a zeitgeist where Taylor Swift and Beyonc\u00e9 shall never be dethroned. Savvy enough to know she couldn\u2019t be the queen, Carpenter chose to play the clown.<\/p>\n Easier said than done, but you wouldn\u2019t know it after listening to \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d a 12-track album that feels weightless, frictionless, fast and fun. Lyrically, Carpenter\u2019s thesis is that heterosexual American men are hopelessly self-important imbeciles whom she can\u2019t 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, \u201cManchild<\/a>,\u201d in which Carpenter informs us that \u201cI like my men all incompetent.\u201d How incompetent? On the very next cut, the disco-pulsed \u201cTears<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u201cMy Man on Willpower<\/a>,\u201d that beautiful Po\u00e4ng putter-togetherer begins to slip through her fingers, growing distant as he embarks on a dim journey of self-discovery, \u201cmy slutty pajamas not tempting him in the least,\u201d she sings. Somehow, we\u2019re only three songs into this thing.<\/p>\n Whether the nine tracks that follow get any better \u2014 or, really, if anything on this album seems capable of eclipsing \u201cPlease Please Please\u201d or \u201cEspresso\u201d \u2014 remains tough to say. That\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n Could the music itself be funnier? Not without curdling into something zany. Carpenter\u2019s 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 \u2014 perhaps to put everything in neutral and let the jokes fly. Jack Antonoff was employed here as a producer, and he\u2019s the guy everybody calls when they want to sound like everybody else. As for Carpenter\u2019s singing, it\u2019s teasing and alert, landing somewhere between Glinda the Good Witch and Nina Persson of the Cardigans singing \u201cLovefool<\/a>,\u201d her delicate timbres only making the soft raunch of her zingers land more perfectly.<\/p>\n When pop songs feel this funny, it\u2019s 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\u2019s true, there are only two moments on \u201cMan\u2019s Best Friend\u201d when Carpenter isn\u2019t expressing romantic and\/or sexual disappointment \u2014 the self-explanatory \u201cWhen Did You Get Hot?<\/a>\u201d and the zesty \u201cHouse Tour<\/a>,\u201d in which she sings, \u201cI promise none of this is a metaphor.\u201d No spoilers regarding what\u2019s sung next, but let\u2019s zoom out on that line and take Carpenter at her word. She\u2019s being funny to be funny, and she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019ve always lived in a world filled with funny pop songs, but funny pop singers are much harder to come by. Maybe that\u2019s because going for laughs and being taken seriously as an artist don\u2019t often square in our cultural imagination, and maybe that\u2019s why Sabrina Carpenter seems to be inventing a new kind of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1946120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[358074,358073,27664],"class_list":["post-1987274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-pop-singers","tag-pop-songs","tag-sabrina-carpenter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Lloyd-native-nominated-for-6-IBMA-awards.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1987274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1987274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1987274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1946120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1987274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1987274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1987274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}