Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang had a hit podcast together (“Las Culturistas”) before Yang broke out as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Where’s the spotlight for Rogers, tho? Perhaps staging his own Christmas musical special will do the trick.
MATT ROGERS: HAVE YOU HEARD OF CHRISTMAS?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: It has been quite the 2022 for Matt Rogers.
After some minor breakthroughs in 2020-2021 (co-hosting Gayme Show for Quibi/Roku, hosting Haute Dog for HBO Max, and voicing/writing on Q-Force for Netflix), Rogers finally broke out in style this year thanks to juicy roles on Hulu’s Fire Island and in Showtime’s I Love That For You. Having already found a home on Showtime, he’s now starring in his own Christmas variety hour, complete with musical numbers and offstage sketches. Yang shows up for a pivotal cameo, while Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson (The Opposition with Jordan Klepper) join Rogers and accompanist/co-writer Henry Koperski for a song, too.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Catherine Cohen’s Netflix musical also filmed at Joe’s Pub with Koperski collaborating on the piano.
Memorable Jokes: The musical numbers are broken up by a series of sketches following “Matt Rogers” as he cravenly hopes to be crowned the new prince of Christmas, by Mariah Carey, no less. Can his PR team land Carey for the gig? Will a surprise visit to a classroom of 10-year-olds help his cause? The answers may not surprise you.
But it’s the songs that make the musical.
Rogers issues the titular number as a challenge for viewers to ask passersby, only to reveal that his own knowledge of the holiday is on par with John Belushi’s “Bluto” from Animal House. Many of his songs about the holiday are downright horny, even ones where he imagines Christmas from the perspective of Mrs. Claus, or from Martha May Whovier as portrayed by Christine Baranski from Jim Carrey’s version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
The song featuring Sharp and Jackson is likewise NSFW, wondering how to respond to family members with invasively micro-aggressive questions about their sex lives as gay men.
Our Take: What role is there in comedy or culture for Rogers if his podcast bestie Yang is the famous gay and Billy Eichner is Mariah’s “Christmas gay” already?
For this is an hour in which Rogers both seeks to deconstruct and mock the Christmas industrial shopping complex, while also placing himself firmly within its firmament. For every moment where he brilliantly questions why we haven’t properly celebrated nor even acknowledged Mrs. Claus (singing his points directly to camera), there is another moment where he’s smirking or slinking about, singing sultry thirst traps.
He wants it both ways, so to speak. But the thing is, Rogers mostly succeeds even while flip-flopping between sentimental and sarcastic, sometimes within the same number. He can make us feel for him and his collaborator, Koperski, when he addresses “the elephant in the room” which was their two-and-a-half-year relationship, only to then perform a song together about a fictitious longing for a date to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree and any number of NBC employees who may enter or exit the building. And when he tears up before his finale, acknowledging Koperski for the huge role he has played in allowing Rogers to achieve his dream of filming a special at Joe’s Pub, we completely buy into his sincerity. Only to realize he’s merely but truly sincerely funny about the whole holiday. Hole or pole position, notwithstanding.
Our Call: STREAM IT. This hour will likely land Rogers on Santa’s Naughty List, but at least he’s on the list now!
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.