Rose Matafeo is “very bad at endings,” as she warns the audience at the start of her new comedy special.
But beginnings can also be tricky — both in general and specifically in filmed standup specials. In many of them, the comedian faces the challenge of coming up with a creative opening, a new variation on the usual scene of them entering the theater and taking the stage.
“How many ways can you show a comedian walking down a hallway? It’s very difficult. I’m obsessed with just watching the first bits of all these comedy specials to see, like, How did they walk to the stage?” Matafeo told me in an interview. “There are people who do it in much cooler ways, but I do think, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Whatever your version is of that, I find it’s quite exciting. It usually works.”
Her version is an opening dance sequence set to the Janet Jackson song “The Pleasure Principle,” which is how she kicks off “Rose Matafeo: On and On and On,” premiering Thursday on Max. The dance is a component she has retained from the live versions of the show, which she has performed in various cities over the past year.
“I always started the show with the dance because I hate introducing myself on the stage. I think it feels so silly a lot of the time. So, very early on the live show, I was, like, ‘How do I get onto the stage and start the show in a fun way?’” she said, before joking it was also for a pretty practical reason when she was performing the show night after night. “Genuinely, I was just, like, ‘What’s a way that I can do at least a small amount of physical exercise?’”
At the end of the hour, she exits the stage the same way. Matafeo said that for her, it’s one of the most fun parts of the show.
“I had this idea that I want it to feel like it is this loop,” she said. “There’s something satisfying about the end that’s [also] the beginning that, yeah, that is a payoff. There’s a payoff at the end — if you make it to the end, guys. Many people don’t, with stand-up specials. So watch for the end. It’s like basically my version of a Marvel mid-credits sequence.”
Ending by returning to the beginning is an apt metaphor for the show itself, filmed earlier this fall in London, where she lives. As its title suggests, Matafeo explores various kinds of endless loops, like how we might think of ourselves as older and wiser than we were before, but we’re constantly repeating the same life experiences and mistakes over and over again; or how everything old is new again, such as the tendency on the Internet and in the self-help industrial complex to turn seemingly everything into a trend. Case in point: In the show, she points out that the self-help trend of telling single people to embrace “dating yourself” or going on a “solo date” is really just “living your goddamn life!”
Throughout the special, the New Zealand comedian’s combination of sharp observations and encyclopedic pop culture references will be familiar to fans of her previous work, including her first comedy special, “Horndog,” and the three seasons of her excellent series on Max, “Starstruck,” which cleverly flips the script on rom-com tropes.
It was while she was editing the third season of “Starstruck” in early 2023 that she started to collect some of the pieces which became this new hour of comedy. While going through a few particularly bruising breakups and other life crises, Matafeo found herself jotting down various musings and seeds of ideas in her phone’s Notes app. The note grew and grew, eventually amassing 16,000 words, as she explains in the comedy special. She also jokes about how bizarre it is that the Notes app has become an all-purpose repository for everything from our deepest life questions, to our grocery list to “a celebrity apologizing for making a racial slur.”
Eventually she pasted the gargantuan note into a Microsoft Word document and printed it out (all 30 pages of it) — which, as she observes in the special, is an unnatural place for it to be. “Fonts are missing. It’s not its natural habitat to see a note in a Microsoft Word document. It’s like seeing a teacher in a fucking supermarket. It’s not right.”
Throughout 2023, Matafeo started performing some loose sets at small comedy clubs, using the contents of the note as material for her standup. “I think I found doing standup about the messiness I was experiencing felt quite cathartic and at least got me out of the house,” she said in our interview. “I was crying during the edits of ‘Starstruck’ because I was going through such a terrible time. But then, to be able to turn it into a routine and then do it that week, or continue to work on it, felt really fun. And I think it progresses your dealing with all of the stuff. It goes a bit faster.”
Earlier this year, when she began performing the show as a more fully formed hour, she realized she needed to find its through line, thinking: “I have to put some type of scaffolding to it, even if it’s kind of shit.”
She said whenever the pieces of something she’s working on start to come together, it’s like a gift from “Future You.”
“You’ve got all the stuff, and you are just figuring out this kind of puzzle that you’ve made. You’ve made the jigsaw, you’ve fucking broken it up and you are kind of putting it back together again.”
Compared with performing live, she doesn’t love the rigidity of filmed specials, like having to fit the show into a tight hour and launch right in, “which can be pretty, pretty fucking brutal sometimes, because you’ve got no way of warming anyone up.”
With live shows, she likes being able to tailor her set and adjust the material based on the audience reaction. “I mix up orders sometimes, and I do sometimes just take stuff out when I know I’m going over, or I don’t want to be on stage anymore, or they’re going to hate this bit. So I definitely edit on the fly,” Matafeo said. “There are different portions of the show where I go, ‘Oh, I don’t think, on a Monday night in Scotland, they’re going to enjoy this joke. So I’ll just skip over that.’”
For instance, she has noticed the reception toward pop culture references can vary depending on the crowd and the location, and she tends to get different reactions from British versus American audiences.
“I think being from New Zealand, culturally, it’s really odd because I think you’re in between two massive Western cultures as influences,” she said. “Like in the U.K., they’ve never heard of ‘The Nanny.’ They’ve never heard of ‘The Nanny.’ They don’t know what the hell — I once tried to do a joke about ‘The Nanny.’ And everyone was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
At one point in the special, Matafeo notes she is 32, which is the moment when it all clicked for me when I saw her perform a live version of the show in New York last month. A lot of her material had felt deeply (and perhaps painfully) relatable to me, as someone also in her early 30s.
When I asked if she thinks there’s something about our particular phase of life that makes us who we are, Matafeo pointed out perhaps it’s because “people go through massive transformations at this age. And, yeah, it’s just a bit freaky. A bit freaky.”
But she also reminded me that although it makes sense we might gravitate toward people who share a similar experience at the same time we’re going through it, it’s all relative.
“Of course, we all feel the same way at the same time when we’re at the same age. And I think being at this age in different times in history obviously is going to be different — like if we were in Shakespearean times, we’d be fucking dead or whatever. So it’s weird because it’s like, you’re constantly shifting,” she said. “With life expectancy getting longer, goals shift, I think. The idea that we’re just beginning to start thinking about having kids and all this stuff, compared to even my mom’s generation, where it’s, like, you have your kids in your 20s, that’s it. Those goalposts are constantly shifting, and it gives you new, fresh things to sort of panic about.”
She conceded that comedy about being at whatever age you are isn’t exactly original, returning to the cyclical theme of the show — and, it seems, of our conversation. After all, we’re just going through everything that people older than us have already experienced.
“I’m not treading any new ground, which is the funny thing of, like, going, ‘Being in your early 30s is crazy, right?’ And people in their 40s and 50s are like, ‘Shut the fuck up! Of course it is!’” she said. “I am so aware of the fact that I will look back — and I already look back on things of me at a younger age being like, ‘What the…? What are you talking about?’ — which is in some way comforting. And it’s kind of like I say in the show, where it’s, like, I know that there is so much — if I make it to 40 or 50, there is a wiser version of me. But you can’t rush that.”
“That is slightly frustrating about being in your 30s. You are exiting the slight idealism of your 20s, when you’re going: ‘The world is my oyster!’ And then you kind of get into your 30s, and you go: ‘It’s not an oyster.’ It’s not necessarily an oyster. It becomes, I don’t know, a little bit more narrowed, a bit more realistic.”
“A clam, maybe?” I suggested.
“Yeah, a clam. A cockle.”
“Rose Matafeo: On and On and On” premieres Thursday on Max.