Katy Perry Is Bad at Satire

On July 11, Katy Perry released “Woman’s World,” her first single off the forthcoming 143, her first album in four years. Along with the song was the release of a music video, which is broken into two parts: first featuring Perry as a sexy Rosie the Riveter promoting vibrators and peeing in urinals and then featuring Katy Perry as Katy Perry, in a bikini and with robot legs, interacting with a hodgepodge of pro-women imagery.

If it is a woman’s world, clearly Perry is not the titular woman, because both the song and video flopped. Vulture called the former “the stalest sort of retread,” while the Cut said Perry is stuck in 2016. Many people on many sites said some version of the same.

Two days later, Perry seemingly responded to the criticism by tweeting a clip of her explaining the very basic premise of the music video along with her own caption: “YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! EVEN SATIRE!” Similarly, some viewers argued that much of the backlash missed the point and that Perry also thinks the things in the video are bad. What these defenses forget is that just because something is satire doesn’t make it not suck. In fact, a lot of satire sucks. One example is Katy Perry’s video for “Woman’s World.” Here, how America’s most comedy-forward white female pop star got it all backward.

There is a paradox in creating satire: Deeper albeit subtler satirical work will often be misconstrued as celebration by people who identify with the characters meant to be satirized, while satirical work with crystal-clear intention often comes off as obvious, if not downright condescending, to its audience. And if Perry is anything in “Woman’s World,” she is obvious. With the way she holds the bottle of “Whiskey for Women” with a huge smile on her face, the label might as well read “Satirical Whiskey to Symbolize the Commodification of Feminism.” To be dressed as Rosie the Riveter but encircled by women holding vibrators at her is not a commentary as much as a clumping together of first-thought imagery. The instinct to tweet “YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! EVEN SATIRE!” reflects a complete underestimation of the intelligence of viewers — and of the criticism to the music video itself.

While the satire of “Woman’s World” is obvious in most ways, the video is deeply confusing. The first act is meant ironically, but the song itself is not ironic. In the lyrics, Perry is 100 percent earnestly trying to sell the audience on a sort of empowerment of the era that the beginning of the video is supposed to be mocking. But then the anvil falls on her and, by her own account, the video is supposed to enter a world of a completely different idea of feminism that reflects Perry’s philosophical evolution.

So then why does the second part include a scene in which Perry greets a young Black woman in a “Feminine Divine” T-shirt doing the dance moves from the first half of the video and then steals her moves and equipment before flying off on a helicopter? The point she’s trying to make is completely unclear. Is she saying that this is something that used to happen but doesn’t anymore in her vision of contemporary feminism? Is she arguing that pop stars are ultimately too self-interested to actually participate in allyship, which would undercut her own explanation of the entire video? Mostly, it feels as if they got toward the end of shooting and were like, “Oh no, we didn’t acknowledge that Katy knows that racism exists.” It comes off as tremendously underthought.

But at least in that case, you have some sense of what Perry is even referring to. Two-thirds of the way through the video, Perry’s robot legs are running out of battery, so she goes to a gas station and sticks a pump into her butt. My first thought was that this was some sort of comment on how capitalism is intertwined in society’s problems — something about how the exploitation of the female body is connected to the exploitation of natural resources. Or maybe it was a comment on BBLs. But then I remembered this was in the supposed non-satirical portion of the video, so I wondered if she was implying — and there’s no delicate way of putting this — she is pumping her butt up with gas. You know, like farts. Nothing against gas-based comedy, but sometimes, like this time, it feels as though the creators ran out of ideas, needed to fill time, and just said, “LOL well, butts are funny, right?”

Perry’s “satire” defense pushes back on the most prevalent critique of the “Woman’s World” video: that it’s stuck in Hillary-era pop feminism, which took place around the time of Perry’s most famous empowerment anthem, 2013’s “Roar.” The “Woman’s World” video, she claims, is meant to mock the naïveté of that bygone era. But mocking the naïveté of that bygone era is also dated. SNL aired “This Is Not a Feminist Song” in the spring of 2016. “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss” became a meme in 2021, but by that point girlboss had already been well established as a punch line on Twitter and in the alternative-comedy world. The result is a feminist critique nearly as dated as the sort of feminism Perry is supposedly critiquing.

If no one laughs, you can’t say your work is funny, and the same goes for attempts at irony. Viewers understood Perry was using imagery ironically in the video — see point No. 1 of this article — but ultimately they didn’t buy the satirical point she was making. That’s because they know who Katy Perry is and who she voted for in the 2022 L.A. mayoral election. They also know that the song was produced by Dr. Luke. So as much as Perry claims she is mocking certain feminist tropes and ideas, viewers recognize she is also participating in those tropes and ideas through the video. Satire demands self-awareness; otherwise, you just come off as a hypocrite.

The thing about Katy Perry is that she’s at her best when she embodies full, naïve commitment to stupid ideas. Her best music videos feel like, This is what a human person thinks is a normal, fun thing to do on-camera, and then it’s whipped-cream boob cannons. Perry has always been aware of the comedy permeating throughout her work, but there was something delightful in feeling like she wasn’t really in total control of it. “Woman’s World,” unfortunately, seems like the exact opposite: half-hearted commitment to a cynical, supposedly smart idea. Just because a piece of comedy is a satire doesn’t mean it is better than other comedy. Often, it means it’s worse. That said, the chorus is catchy.