Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Rose Matafeo won the top prize for her show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the year after Hannah Gadsby had done likewise for her Emmy-winning Netflix breakthrough, Nanette. Rose Matafeo: Horndog on HBO Max is no Nanette. And that’s on purpose.
ROSE MATAFEO: HORNDOG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Matafeo got her start in comedy as a teenager in New Zealand, and by 18 had earned honors as the best newcomer in her native country’s comedy festival. In the subsequent decade, Matafeo has appeared on multiple panel shows and series in the UK, including Taskmaster, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, and W1A.
Her crowning achievement thus far is her show, Horndog, which not only took home the top prize in Edinburgh two summers ago, but also enjoyed runs at comedy festivals in Australia and New Zealand, as well as a theatrical run in London’s West End. Which has led to more success, including a starring role in the upcoming feature film, Baby Done (executive produced by Taika Waititi), and an HBO Max series she’s writing and will star in, Starstruck. What about Horndog, though? Seeing as Matafeo cops to kissing all of nine men in her first 27 years of life, she might not be the horny you’re thinking of. As she jokes about her show’s perhaps misleading title: “This show is about love, so if you did come tonight, expecting a sexy sex show, um…so sorry!”
American audiences may have seen Matafeo last year on Conan, where she provided some relevant background information about herself and her romantic expectations that prove useful before watching Horndog.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Matafeo’s joke about Love Island may sum it up. She really wants to appear on the series, but in her imagining of it, they’re living in a mansion and not an island, wearing sweaters instead of crop-tops, and they’re there to solve a murder. So a game of “Clue,” but in Horndog, she’s attempting to solve her love life.
Memorable Jokes: For a show she has performed for at least two years around the world hundreds of times, Matafeo still employs a playful looseness onstage that really suggests she can enjoy the little moments that pop up during any individual performance.
From an opening gag about her wardrobe choice for the HBO Max taping, to a great cover line when a riff doesn’t land quite how she had hoped, she scores even bigger laughs from the alleged miscues.
She also takes us back to 2005 to relive her own journey through puberty, epitomizing the uniqueness of that period in time with photos of herself holding both a phone and a digital camera, while also fully embracing today’s meme culture while playing snippets of 2000s-era emo hits for us all to reminisce. Ah yes, a time when Matafeo could get kicked off of a Franz Ferdinand message board at age 14 for merely expressing her desire to marry the lead singer. The Internet was different, then. And so was Matafeo. So were we all.
She may not have gotten the attention from boys her age that she was seeking back then, but back then, she also wasn’t even that aware of the kind of attention she could have had. She jokes about her late-blooming sexual education, and what she has learned about herself and her expectations about love since then.
Our Take: Matafeo braces her viewers in the very beginning that her show is no TED Talk, and will not leave you with deep life lessons. “It is not one of those f—ing comedy shows where it’s like, oh, there’s a lesson to be learned at the end of it. I hate that kind of s–t.” In fact, she mocks women her age (and younger) who sport clothing or notebooks with faux-inspirational messages on them.
But she embraces the idea of loving anything passionately enough to devote your life to it, and jokes that if she had gone to “thesaurus dot com,” she would have retitled her show about passion instead of horniness.
Alas, here we are. But the paths of passion and horniness do cross when Matafeo describes to us the sight of seeing young girls in isolation at a K-pop convention in Auckland, coming together in synchronized dance when their favorite song sounds over the loudspeakers. And the paths all come back around at the end, when Matafeo’s purposefully anticlimactic ending reveals not one, but two big finishing flourishes that leave you smiling and full of hope. Not only for her but for you, too.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Matafeo questions how relatable her comedy is at times, but anyone with any sort of passion can relate to her hijinks. Even a dumb straight guy.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
