June 22, 2025

by Hazel Cills

This week, NPR Music editor Hazel Cills shares her appreciation for the crackerjack comic charm of pop’s biggest new personality.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

When was the last time a pop song made you laugh? Not a “god, this song sucks” kind of a laugh — a moment where you really connected with an artist’s sense of humor?

The same handful of songs have dominated the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 for months now, some of them even hanging on for over a year. And when I survey the most popular songs in America right now, I fear we’re trapped in a moment of deathly self-seriousness. We’ve got a few heartbroken ballads from the self-proclaimed “problem” country star Morgan Wallen, thunderously intense, scream-along tracks like Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” and Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control,” and a moody hit about getting tipsy that’s more about drinking away your problems than truly partying.

But you know who doesn’t take herself too seriously? Sabrina Carpenter, whose new single “Manchild” debuted at the top of this chart this week. The synth-pop country song finds the artist squarely in her element: making fun of helpless “manchildren” in her life who can’t do anything without her help. “Why so sexy if so dumb?” Carpenter sings, exasperated, to her clueless boy toy. “And how survive the Earth so long?” It’s the first song I’ve heard in a particularly dreadful, stagnant year that sounds like it could be the song of the summer — “Manchild” is sunny, it’s catchy and, more importantly, it’s funny.

“Manchild” follows Carpenter’s hit formula, one she mastered on her sixth studio album last year, Short n’ Sweet. Across 12 songs, the 26-year-old singer made the men she encounters in her romantic life — painted as universally clumsy, stupid, embarrassing (and, to her annoyance, still alluring) — her punchline, bonking them over the head with her sharp, twisted songwriting like a giant Looney Tunes mallet in hopes they’ll get their act together. “This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their and they are,” Carpenter sang on “Slim Pickins,” a song bemoaning the lack of suitable boyfriends because all the “good ones are deceased or taken.” Elsewhere, she encouraged a man who has wronged her to “save all your breath for your floor meditation.”

In theory, this schtick could get annoying fast, but Carpenter, who started her career on a Disney sitcom, brings a literally professional comedic timing to her songs that turn her work into more of an act than just straightforward musical performance. She giggles and makes small asides in the margins of her songs like she’s doing crowd work for a live audience. This is a woman who ruled most of 2025 with a song about keeping a man up at night like a cup of espresso, a hit so irresistibly goofy that two-thirds of the way in, you can actually hear Carpenter poke fun at her own lyrics — “stupid,” she says. Stupid, indeed, but also harder than it looks. At this year’s Grammys, she went full slapstick for her mash-up of “Espresso” and “Please, Please, Please,” bumbling about on stage in a tribute to another blonde comic, Goldie Hawn. To a listener turned off by pop music, Carpenter’s songs might sound frothy and simplistic at first listen, but I have a hard time imagining any of her peers pulling off their humor the way she does.

Of course, not everyone is charmed. I’ve found that many critics and friends either adore or hate Carpenter’s essentialist, “girls rule and boys drool” thesis, or find her hyper-feminine, retrograde packaging (literal packaging, if you haven’t seen the controversial cover for the album upon which “Manchild” will appear) grating or subversive. It’s always been clear to me that Carpenter is playing a character in her music as all pop stars do. Hers is a girly, larger-than-life figure trapped in a world of himbos, playing with well-worn, battle-of-the-sexes tropes across decades and genres. In “Manchild,” I hear the fist-raising classic country of songs like “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” but also the attitude of ’00s R&B hits like “No Scrubs.” Every jab and insult leveled at men in her music is played like a gag fit for a screwball comedy, Carpenter a modern Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve making a show of tripping every dummy in her path on the way to chart domination.

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