Starstruck creator/star Rose Matafeo returns to Max with her second stand-up special, trying to find meaning and connections in the 16,000-word Note she kept adding to “on and on and on” again over the years in her phone. It looks a lot different when she shows you the pages printed out outside of the phone. But how much sense does it make when she gives voice to it all?
The Gist: Originally from New Zealand, Matafeo is best known for creating, writing, directing, and starring in the Max series, Starstruck. Her debut stand-up special, Horndog, also debuted on Max in 2020, following her Best Show win for performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018.
You can hear her right now on the big screen voicing the character of Loto in Disney’s Moana 2.
Matafeo’s new comedy special received Best Show nomination this spring at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and finds the comedian revealing how dating and relationships in her 30s (versus her 20s) have made her rethink just about everything.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: You probably haven’t seen what Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag looked like as a one-woman show before it became an award-winning series, but there’s something similar in the vibes that Matafeo is putting down here, spilling about her feelings toward relationships, and sometimes even just spilling about.
Memorable Jokes: At one point early in the hour, after letting us know that she has based this performance on her singular, never-ending Notes app note, we see what looks to be notes on the floor. And sure enough, Matafeo picks up the yellow sheets to show us what she says are 30 pages of size-10 font printed out notes from her app, an “unhinged manifesto” of some 16,000 words. “It was not an easy read,” she acknowledges, adding that she need only cite one line from her note to prove her point, as she had jotted down: “I may have a load of problems, but at least I have a heart.”
Later, she jokes that not all of her revelations are laugh-out-loud funny. “Some of them will be very sad poems that don’t rhyme,” she says. “That’s the most one-woman show idea, I promise.”
But Matafeo does have actual jokes, too, including observations about how we’ve taken the concept of self-care too far; how when you’re dumped in your 30s, it’s somehow more emotionally significant and says more about your character; what her favorite bus line is in London and what she has witnessed en route to make it so.
And she takes a tumble to the floor for her art, too. Pratfalls after a bit about feeling like a spinster leads to a fun reveal in which we learn just what goes into the bit, and how it’s another sign of her becoming a 30-something.
Our Take: Opening a show by saying “I am very bad at endings” almost guarantees some foreshadowing.
As for how she opens the special, we see Matafeo backstage preparing to go on, as somewhere off camera but onstage, someone else is making the audience howl with applause and laughter. Matafeo appears mostly unfazed? Instead, she bounds onstage, dancing as if nobody’s watching to the sounds of Janet Jackson’s “Pleasure Principle.”
She may no longer be the Horndog she portrayed herself as before the pandemic, but Matafeo still gives off energy as if she’s both yearning for romantic love as well as apathetic about the whole concept of spending the rest of her life with any one person. Perhaps that’s how she might wonder enough to Google Incognito whether you can get broken up with for being “too cool.”
In a curiously unacknowledged moment of wordplay, Matafeo reflects on what her generation learned about romance, saying she looks back on that period with “Rose-tinted glasses.”
Instead, she spends more time filling us in on the old American woman whose podcast has helped guide Matafeo through her feelings in the year since she printed our her lengthy note. Has she grown? Certainly. Has Matafeo made any major life decisions because of it? As she has to remind us: “Have any of you been listening to a single thing I have been saying?”
I wish she had followed through with that Zoom coaching session, though. Just for the laughs.
Our Call: STREAM IT. When she’s splayed out on the stage floor, Matafeo casually remarks about herself: “I’m like Shelley Winters in every film she’s ever been in.” And hasn’t every film Winters been in been better for it?
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
