The smartest recent joke I’ve heard at the intersection of sex and politics does not seem at first to be particularly sexual or political. In her debut special, a half-hour on Comedy Central released last month, Emmy Blotnick, a 30-year-old rising star who writes for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” describes the shock of realizing that many of her favorite songs, including ones from Britney Spears and Taylor Swift, were written by the Swedish producer Max Martin.

This one man, she concludes, taught her what “it means to be a sexy woman.” If not for him, she joked, she would never have tried on a halter top. How does this man know exactly what she wants to hear? She researches the question and says that she found an interview with one of his colleagues who said, to understand what women want, every month, “we read Cosmo.”

Blotnick appears stunned, calling Cosmopolitan magazine “the worst representation of women in the world,” adding: “For most of my life I’ve been doing a bad impression of a middle-aged Swedish guy doing a bad impression of an American garbage woman.” With the befuddlement of a narrator from a Philip K. Dick novel who just woke up to realize everything she thought was true was false, she says, “My life is a lie.”