On the opening night of her Emails I Can’t Send tour, Disney Channel kid turned pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter serenaded her fans with a rendition of fan-favourite single Nonsense. As the song reached its crescendo, Carpenter careened around the stage clad in her characteristic get-up of big blocky heels and a teeny tiny skirt, before surprising the audience with a totally new outro to the song. “Come over tonight, my room is spotless / I’m sorry this outro is so chaotic / Atlanta, it’s official you're the hottest,” she crooned into the mic, sending the crowd into meltdown.

It was the first of many ad-libbed Nonsense outros; to this day, every time Carpenter performs the song, she tweaks and tailors the outro, often jam-packing the three-line coda with as many innuendos as possible. “He said that he wishes he was on me / Got me wetter than the Jewel Changi / Singapore I hope you like my song-y,” she sang during a performance at Singapore’s National Stadium in March this year. Her Coachella outro cheekily acknowledged rumours of a burgeoning romance between herself and Saltburn actor Barry Keoghan: “Made his knees so weak he had to spread mine / He’s drinking my bathwater like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline.”

Carpenter’s astronomical success can largely be put down to the fact that she clearly has a knack for writing a good earworm and is unquestionably hard-working. But there’s also a quality to Carpenter and her music which has been conspicuously absent from the charts for years now: humour. She’s funny, lively, animated – like a shot of espresso in a genre swamped with downbeat decaf. “Carpenter sounds happier than Taylor [Swift]: goofier, and much more horny. Most importantly, she has humour,” arts journalist Kate Mossman recently wrote in the New Statesman. “Humour is of great value in pop, and under-employed these days”.

But there are signs that pop could finally be getting funny again. Chappell Roan has been bringing campy humour to the mainstream since her breakout earlier this year, from lamenting men being unable to “get it hot like Papa John” in her single “Femininomenon”, to painting her whole body green to perform as a draggy Statue of Liberty at New York’s Gov Ball. Irreverence also permeates Charli XCX’s Brat, where she sings, unabashed, about her desire to hear her own music in the club: “I wanna dance to me, me, me, me, me”. On “Guess featuring Billie Eilish”, Eilish (gay) jokes about fancying Charli (straight): “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it”. Even the marketing behind Brat has been funny: the artist is selling a temporary lower back tattoo on her online merch store which simply reads “lower back tattoo”, for example. “It’s very Pet Shop Boys-esque, dry British humour,” says Bradley Stern, music journalist and co-host of pop culture podcast Legends Only.

This isn’t anything new – as Mossman implies, pop and humour are a natural pairing. “The late 00s into early 10s in dance-pop – which I think is loosely being referred to as ‘recession pop’ these days – were an especially unserious time,” Stern says. “LMFAO. Black Eyed Peas. Kesha. Katy Perry and her ‘Peacock’. Gaga’s disco stick [...] and there was so much lyrical cleverness and humour in hip-hop in the 00s – Missy Elliot, Outkast, Lil Jon, Eminem, Kanye.” Back in the 90s, the Spice Girls caught listeners’ ears by incorporating the ungrammatical line “I wanna really really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah” into their debut single “Wannabe”. The Beatles’ catalogue houses some of the best examples of how silliness can be put to use in music, from the absurd, Carroll-esque lyrics in “I Am The Walrus” to their penchant for mixing studio chatter into their songs, à la Ringo Starr yelling “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” at the end of “Helter Skelter”.

But in recent years, shareability and mass appeal have become greater priorities to tastemaking institutions like music labels than innovation or true novelty – or humour. As Mossman notes, humour is almost antithetical to someone like pop behemoth Taylor Swift, whose catalogue is stuffed with confessional ballads about the tribulations of love and whose image is purposely beige and safe in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. Sure, she isn’t entirely humourless – she’s given us some funny lines (“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”) and she’s not afraid to dance badly in public or on stage – but proper humour often comes from taking risks, being unflinchingly self-deprecating, or simply embracing weirdness, none of which is really in Swift’s wheelhouse.

“With Taylor, when she ‘does’ fun it reads as too tryhard, because in many ways it doesn’t reflect her personality, or at least who we think she is,” says Michael Cragg, music journalist and author of Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop's Final Party. “It reads as ‘zany’ or ‘wacky’, which kills genuine fun stone dead. You either need a lighter touch, or for it to just come naturally.”

But why have Swift and other figureheads of ‘sad girl pop’ have commandeered culture for so long – and why are audiences now lapping up this new wave of fun, fresh pop? “I think the pendulum always swings,” Stern says, adding that he believes Swift was right to call Lana Del Rey ‘the most influential artist in pop’ at Billboard event in 2019. “[Lana’s] sound rippled through popular acts for a while – either as a reaction, like Lorde’s ‘Royals’, or as inspiration, like Swift’s ‘Wildest Dreams’.” He adds that other popular artists with a ‘sadder’ sound like Billie Eilish, Halsey and Olivia Rodrigo have all cited Del Rey as an influence too.

According to Cragg, tastes began to shift after the events of 2020. “I definitely thought – hoped – this would happen as we came out of the pandemic,” he explains. “It felt like pop was getting darker and darker and what we needed post-pandemic was a veer towards something more fun and frivolous. It’s taken a few years, but it feels like we’re there now.”

“What you have with Charli, and even Billie, are two female artists who have worked through a lot of shit in the music industry and who now feel like they can be comfortable being the kind of artist they want to be,” Cragg continues. “Charli seems much more relaxed now and that’s resulting in music that feels like it’s representative of who she is as a person”. Roan has likely had a similar experience. In a 2023 interview with Vulture, she opened up about her struggle to be her authentic self within profit-driven spaces: “It’s really hard to allow yourself to let the camp in when the whole music industry is just about trying to prove how good you are.”

None of this is to say there is no place in culture for earnest, sombre pop; I would never want to live in a world without Lana Del Rey. And, besides, even this new wave of ‘fun’ popstars are more than capable of being serious too. Sure, “365” is a silly little love letter to cocaine, but “I think about it all the time” is about experiencing conflicting feelings towards motherhood and “Apple” is about generational trauma. “Brat works because it has the light and the dark”, Cragg says. “Pop doesn’t always have to be fun.” But, he stresses: “it has to have a slither of it somewhere.”