Almost as soon as the pop star Katy Perry had returned from a very brief trip to space with a group hosted by Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, the derisive comments started.

In Slate, Heather Schwedel wrote: “It was one thing to understand intellectually that Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez’s much hyped ‘all-female’ trip to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket would in actuality only be an underwhelming 11 minutes long. But it was another to watch it play out over a multihour, breathless livestream that culminated with Perry kissing the Earth like a soldier returning from war and not a multimillionaire returning from the world’s shortest influencer trip.”

Ellen Cushing, writing for The Atlantic, proclaimed Ms. Perry to be the “perfect pop star for a dumb stunt.” Various celebrities, like the actress Olivia Wilde and the model Emily Ratajkowski, criticized Ms. Perry and the Blue Origin flight.

Even the X account for Wendy’s came after Ms. Perry on Tuesday in a series of posts (among them: “can we send her back”). On its face, this seemed a little strange. Why was a fast-food chain offering sideline snark about a pop star heading into space?

But a decade-plus after the songwriter Linda Perry described Ms. Perry’s music as microwave popcorn, one could be forgiven for wondering if the posts from Wendy’s were an erstwhile purveyor of empty calories picking a fight with another.

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