I have long argued that Britney Spears’s second album Oops!… I Did It Again is one of the great comedy albums of the last 30 years. My friend Eric bought it for me for my birthday when we were in Amsterdam together in 1999, and I giggled through my first listen of the CD. I thought it was so bad it was funny, and then I realized that there’s no way that songs like “Oops!… I Did It Again” and “Lucky” could be anything but deliberately comic, and the cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” has to be a joke. And the spoken word interludes? So absurd that they must be ironic. Like the one before “Lucky”:

(Phone rings once and answer machine picks up!)

Britney: Hey, what’s up?
This is Brit and I’m not in right now,
So do your thang.
Beeeeep.
Ha, ha, ha
I’m just kidding!

(Tone beeps)

Guy: (Scuffs)
Yo Brit, you’re a nerd!
You really need to change that message.
But I was thinking about that movie we saw the other night.
You know how she had all that fame and all that money,
but she still wasn’t happy?
Wouldn’t that make a cool song?

The answer is, of course, yes.

Bonus: My friend Curtis thought that the lyric was “She cries, cries, cries in her lonely car.” And not in her lonely heart. LOLz.