Is country music in the middle of a full-on, female-led comedy renaissance?
Ella Langley and Riley Green‘s “You Look Like You Love Me” was funny and frank. Kaitlin Butts‘ “You Ain’t Gotta Die to Be Dead to Me” joked its way through trauma. Megan Moroney‘s “6 Months Later” didn’t mind laughing at its own melodrama. And Kacey Musgraves‘ “Dry Spell” capitalized on the laugh-out-loud humor of horniness.
Read More: Kacey Musgraves’ ‘Dry Spell’ Lyrics Made Us Blush!
Lots of country fans still think of women first as the subject of country love songs: Tan-legged, cowboy-booted, blonde and frankly, pretty one-dimensional.
You might think of female artists as lyrical poets or heartbreak balladeers, and they often are. But many of today’s stars are finding success on charts, TikTok and awards show nominees lists with songs that are witty and thorny. They often speak about men either dismissively or not at all.
Elizabeth Nichols Cracks Jokes At Mens’ Expense in “Oh The Things Men Do”
2026 Taste of Country RISER Elizabeth Nichols rose to fame on TikTok and got a bump toward mainstream success when Kelly Clarkson did a Kellyoke version of her song, “I Got a New One.”
Nichols is sharp and prolific, and deadpan comedy is a mainstay in her music. She tells Taste of Country that for her, songwriting tends to open up accordion-style: She can, and often has, written dozens of versions of the same song, each going in a different direction.
That’s the case with “Oh the Things Men Do,” which she was inspired to write by “this guy [who] really irritated me.”
Nichols says most of the songs she wrote about this guy were “really bad,” but she did walk away from the experience with the title for “Oh the Things Men Do,” a song that exasperatedly asks, “Ain’t it crazy the lengths / Men go / To get a girl / Hor — / —izontal?”
“Stretch the truth / To get laid / Say that he’s 6’2 / To get laid / Does he realize he has to take off the boots / To get laid?” Nichols sings.
She and her cowriters (Laura Veltz, Steve Rusch, Steph Jones) took the song in a funny direction, but she says that they could easily have taken it somewhere darker. “It could be a really sad song,” she points out.
Read More: RISERS: Elizabeth Nichols is Beating Nashville’s System
“The same things men do to get laid, women do to get loved. We talked about that a lot [in the room while we were writing it],” she continues. “And then we made a really funny song. We didn’t go dark that day, but it could really easily be that.”
Done with nuance, comedy and tragedy are almost always two sides of the same story. Historically, much of country’s comedy comes from a topic that’s often painful: Poverty in the hardscrabble rural South.
The History of Comedy in Female-Led Country Music
The Grand Ole Opry and other early country radio shows have incorporated funny women on their stages for a century.
- Myrtle Eleanor Cooper performed as one half of husband-and-wife duo Lulu Belle and Scotty beginning in the 1930s, with Cooper’s comedic persona as the focal point.
- Cousin Emmy worked comedy into her performances through creativity — she even used a rubber glove as an instrument!
- Roni Stoneman was one of the stars of the variety program Hee Haw.
Of course, no female comedian was more beloved at the Grand Ole Opry than Minnie Pearl, who adopted the persona of the gossipy town spinster. She performed with her trademark straw hat, with its $1.98 price tag hanging from the brim, and bellowed her catchphrase, “How-DEE! I’m just so proud to be here!” from the stage.
NBC Television/Courtesy of Getty Images
Comedy at the Opry was, in some ways, the genre’s early answer to the television sitcom: The clueless husband, the embittered wife, the spinster who can’t seem to land a “feller” and the everyday hardships that unfold over the course of it all.
That brand of comedy was a lynchpin of some major male-female duos, too, both on stage and in the studio. Dolly Parton‘s time on Porter Wagoner‘s show was where she developed the signature Dolly-isms and delivery that would go on to be a hallmark of her solo career.
Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty cracked jokes about rural Southern tropes and stereotypes in songs like “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” and in her solo material, Lynn used humor to lighten a serious topic (women’s reproductive freedom) in “The Pill” and “One’s On the Way.”
Even heartbreak queen Tammy Wynette used irony in her George Jones duet, “Two Story House,” to illustrate the disconnect of a fraught marriage.
Using humor gives artists an inroad into topics that are otherwise taboo.
Elizabeth Nichols uses humor for a fresh take on talking politics in “Might Go MAGA,” a song that speaks to the common and under-discussed phenomenon of a woman who’s more left-leaning than her male partner, but is willing to sacrifice some moral high ground to keep a comfortable lifestyle and not cause a ruckus in her relationship.
“I love a boat / And when that wind blows / I won’t hear him talkin’ ‘bout the Mexicans and how we should pray for ‘em / Right before he says, ‘We should deport ‘em’,” she sings. It’s funny, but pointed. Could a straightforward, earnest song be that thorny?
A sitcom-style delivery even makes it easier to write a song about, say, killing an abusive husband — which female country artists have done a lot over the years.
Read More: Earl Had to Die: The 20 Best Country Songs About Killing Your Man
But with longstanding inequalities for women in country music and beyond — plus the statistic that nearly three out of 10 U.S. women have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by a partner — is it really just a joke?
Women Thrive On the Country Charts During Tough Economic Times
In late April, Audiofemme published an article about the rise of an all-genre interest in country music, headed by Ella Langley‘s juggernaut hit “Choosin’ Texas.”
Even more recently than that, Kacey Musgraves‘ very funny Middle of Nowhere album had a strong debut on the charts including a No. 3 placement on the Billboard 200.
Audiofemme cited a 2015 APA study which found that female country artists (particularly older female country artists) fare better on charts during difficult socioeconomic years. Specifically, their uptempo songs were more popular. That’s a contrast to pop music, where ballads from male artists ranked higher during those difficult years.
The survey hypothesized that country music’s base, which trends more working class than pop listeners, preferred “happier sounding songs” from “comforting female figures, like the wives and mothers portrayed in country songs,” as a form of “catharsis” during hard times.
It’s a reasonable guess, but we’ll take that speculation in a slightly different direction.
More than half of country music fans are women — 52 percent, per a 2011 Billboard report. Instead of looking to the genre for a comforting maternal voice, they might be looking for a voice that matches their own.
Carter Faith Proved That Female-Led Comedy Can Get Awards Show Recognition in 2026
Carter Faith — another 2026 Taste of Country RISER — embraced comedy on her breakout debut album Cherry Valley, as a component of something bigger, stranger and sadder.
Read More: Carter Faith Talks About Her Sad, Surreal Cherry Valley Album
The project’s got a sense of humor. Just listen to “Grudge,” a song about a friendship fight that includes the “slightly blasphemous” line, “Even Jesus thinks that you’re a b–ch.“
“I guess it just goes back to showing all different sides of a woman,” she reflects to Taste of Country about the jokes she cracked in those lyrics.
And then she added drily, “And that a woman can be funny. What a concept.”
Humor, on Cherry Valley, is one part of a larger, conscious decision to allow the record to take up more emotional space than is typically allotted for a woman, both musically and beyond. Faith jokes that people tell her “every day” that she’s “too much,” and in a sense, the whole record is a supersized response to that criticism.
Its lead single, “If I Had Never Lost My Mind…” takes the crazy ex-girlfriend trope (which is often used to comedic effect) and maxes it out. This ex-girlfriend is so crazy, in fact, that the lyrics sound like she might be singing them from a psych ward. “Who wants a girl who’s a little deranged / A little too much and a little too strange?” Faith wonders.
Apparently, the ACM Awards do. Cherry Valley was nominated in the coveted Album of the Year category in 2026, marking Faith’s first nomination.
Read More: 25 Modern Female Trailblazers Who Changed the Country Music Game
When I asked Faith and Nichols if they’d ever thought about toning down their musical instincts to avoid being “too much,” they had the same response: An unequivocal nope.
Being funny as a woman in country means being unabashed about taking up space in the genre. It means writing for yourself and for the listeners — the female listeners, largely — that get it. It means delivering some of your most poignant lyrics with a sideeye.
For a group of artists that has historically been minimized and given strict guidelines for what they can and can’t say, humor is a powerful tool. And even better — the uptick in popularity of comedy-driven female country, on charts and beyond, proves it’s working on a global scale.
25 Modern Female Trailblazers Who Changed Country Music
Gallery Credit: Carena Liptak
