La La La: Why it matters that Taylor Swift is hilarious.

Our April Fool's Show & Tell special about Taylor's joke songs is now streaming.

“It’s a thug story tell me can you handle that” In honor of April Fool’s Day this past week, we’re diving into Taylor Swift’s funniest, most unexpected performances — from self-parody and satire to flat-out absurdity. This week, we explore Thug Story (2008), her 2009 SNL monologue, “Monologue Song (La La La)”, and the 2021 SNL Three Sad Virgins sketch to understand how Swift uses humor to subvert expectations, reclaim her narrative, and show off her impeccable comedic timing.

Plus: why baking cookies is the running gag that won’t quit, what a “benign violation” is, and whether “Cats” was actually meant to be a comedy.

🎧 Listen above and ⬇️ scroll below to read Maansi’s extra credit about how Taylor Swift is hilarious and why that matters.

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📜 This Week’s Extra Credit by Maansi

This week’s episode was a special one-off in honor of April Fool’s Day. It actually ended up being super fun because turns out Taylor Swift has some fantastic comedic material that definitely merits some academic inspection. But her spoofs that she’s done over the years are just a small sample of a larger truth: Taylor Swift is hilarious. So today I want to unpack a little bit of what that really means. What does it mean that she’s funny? Why should we care?

Humor me, for a moment, while I put on my marketing hat. Most artists & celebrities are in the business of being talented. Some have obvious talents, like music and acting, others have less obvious talents, like the broad catchall of “entertainment.” Regardless, they ARE the business. And like all businesses, the most successful ones will have put in the time to cultivate a brand. A brand, for singers, can incorporate anything from their name to the way they look, the way they dress, their genre, etc. We’ve talked about Taylor Swift’s branding expertise time and time again, especially in the context of the Eras Tour, in which she crafted brands for every one of her albums in the from of their respective “eras.”

But outside of just creating a brand for her music, she’s also got a very strong brand for herself. For one thing, she’s branded herself as an incredible songwriter. She consistently reminds everyone (in various different ways) that she writes all her own music, she pays a lot of attention to giving any additional songwriters credit, she shares snippets of her songwriting process (videos, voice recordings), and she has been about her journey to record all her albums so she can properly own her music — something would not have been possible if she hadn’t written it all herself. Her transition from country to pop was a big rebranding moment for her as well. Gone was her southern twang, her bouncy blonde curls, and her acoustic guitar. These things were replaced by sleek, straight, cropped blond hair and glitzy, glammy pop outfits.

But one other aspect of her brand that has been very consistent for a long time is that Taylor Swift is your average girl next door — relatable, real, and funny. Her fans LOVE her and connect with her because she takes great care to cultivate her brand in away that allows them to do so. Now as she’s gotten more and more famous over time, staying “relatable” and “real” becomes harder to do. We all know she’s officially a billionaire, her private jet’s carbon emissions came under fire, and perhaps most notably, she has to deal with paparazzi and admirers everywhere she goes. These are not normal things. But there’s one tool that she has used over and over again to break the barriers between her and her fans: humor.

So now I bring you back to where I started. Taylor Swift is hilarious. And part of the reason she’s so funny is because she is not afraid to have some fun at her own expense. Whether it’s taking her cat to her Time Person of the Year photoshoot and wearing him like a neck scarf, or watching in horror as Jimmy Fallon airs a video of her immediately after her Lasik surgery, Taylor Swift has mastered the art of not taking herself too seriously. She knows her superpowers, she knows she’s a serious artist, she knows what she’s good at — but she also knows that you can let people in by letting your guard down a bit and having some fun.

The songs we discussed this week range from 2008 to 2021. What’s astonishing to me is that Taylor Swift decides it’s important to make humor a part of her brand as early as 2008. She’s still so young, she’s new to the industry, most people don’t know her, and she decides, hey, this song is doing well, why not make a spoof of it and go in a totally different direction. SNL monologues are always supposed to be funny, but her monologue could have gone in many different directions. Rather than trying to be a stand up comedian, she decided to just do what she does best, but poke some fun at herself in the process. A more self-conscious or serious artist may think “no this makes me look silly,” but Taylor was confident that she could be taken seriously without having to be serious all the time. In fact, she always prioritized her fans, and recognized that being funny, making fun of herself, would help fans connect with her more effectively. Fast forward to decades later, and while Taylor is no longer quite the girl next door, she still encapsulates the epitome of millennial humor - a quality that has helped her remain incredibly endearing to her fans.