Rose Matafeo is bad at ending things.
This is pretty much the first thing she tells her audience in her new stand-up special, “On and On and On,” premiering Thursday on Max. It’s also a fitting problem for the New Zealand-born, London-based comedian who gained U.S. attention for creating and starring in the romantic comedy “Starstruck,” the Max series she co-wrote with comedian Alice Snedden.
Matafeo was so affable the time she appeared on the British comedy panel competition show “Taskmaster” that even though she didn’t win the season, she did win over a lot of fans with a folk song she wrote in record time about series creator Alex Horne. With lines like “We’ll get five guys and gals to play your game / Who will all be of varying levels of fame,” “Taskmaster Country Rap” is such a perfect earworm that it has even gotten stuck in Matafeo’s own head (“it was an achievement, but it also drove me to madness,” she says, laughing.).
She’s also stuck around for another take at that franchise. With Mike Wozniak, Matafeo currently oversees “Junior Taskmaster,” where she judges precocious childrens’ abilities to complete similarly zany challenges.
But even if Matafeo is bad at letting things go, she’s pretty great at getting them started. The opening for “On and On and On” includes a choreographed dance routine before she delves into a relatable bit about the favorite application of checklist-loving parents and disgraced celebrities everywhere: Apple’s Notes. And the day of our Zoom chat, she’s bright eyed and happily eating a bowl of Special K — the morning after she appeared in a sold-out performance of her new special at Frogtown’s Elysian Theater.
A lot of this is old hat for Matafeo. Now 32, she got her start doing comedy workshops at 15 and has been doing stand-up for more than half her life; a fact that she says makes her feel “a panic slightly rising in my chest.” She talks onstage about relatability and the need for, especially female comics, to be self-deprecating. But she says now that this doesn’t come from a place of impostor syndrome.
“That’s the one thing I don’t think I have,” she says of the feeling of not deserving success. “I have everything else: low self-esteem, terrible relationship with myself, all these things you’re supposed to have in your 30s.”
She explains that “particularly being on stage, or being in front of people or having a certain audience, that entitlement I think is bizarre and strange and not really helpful to me. So I think that kind of goes hand in hand with impostor syndrome of going, ‘I deserve this.’”
The new special is different from “Starstruck,” a TV show that chronicles the work, lifestyles and, yes, fame that get in the way of two people’s happiness. Its finale at the end of Season 3 finds each of them moving on to someone else while also separately acknowledging that it’s impossible to completely cut the emotional tie that pulls them back to the familiarity and comfort of their relationship. Matafeo compares it to the ending of director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman’s oblique romantic drama “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” When she was younger, Matafeo believed that Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s dysfunctional paramours got back together at the end. Now, she’s convinced that they definitely did not.
In “On and On and On,” we check in with Matafeo after a real-life breakup where everyone from her grandmother to her housekeeper is like “girl, move on. You weren’t together long enough to be this upset.” She talks about obsessively chronicling her feelings in the aforementioned Notes app and the surreal experience of suddenly understanding her parents better because she’s now the age they were when she was a kid. Even though these bits are still in the live performances, she cut jokes about Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson from the special due to time (i.e., who has the time to get doxxed online by superfans?). But a joke about the hipster attractiveness of villain Waluigi from the “Mario Kart” game, obviously written and recorded before the real-world arrest of Luigi Mangione in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is staying in.
Most strikingly to a certain subset of the population, “On and On and On” follows in the tradition of her 2020 Max special “Horndog,” in which Matafeo makes jokes about obsessively chronicling her period while wearing white bottoms. Just because she’s older doesn’t mean she’s necessarily wiser.
“In your 20s, you kind of almost think you’ve got it together and now I’m starting this next bit where you’re like, ‘Yeah, you do know nothing,’ and you kind of have to accept the random s— of life” where friends marry and have kids and the generation above you gets sick and dies, she explains.
Matafeo says she’s always had an interest in death; the first show she performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was about her own funeral and involved her jumping out of a coffin in a bejeweled tuxedo.
“I think anyone who’s a little nervous, a little prone to anxiety at times, knows that it’s actually about control,” she explains. “And there’s so much we can’t control. What I think about the show is [that it’s my] learning to accept that there are things we can’t control and that that’s fine.”
“On and On and On” also continues to celebrate Matafeo’s deep love of cinema both old and new, respected and not so much. This time, she references the career of the late actor Shelley Winters and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s whimsy French rom-com “Amélie.”
“I think any of the film references made in my show are for the people who remember going to a physical shop to rent videos and DVDs,” she says. “I think so much of that [experience] was the covers of things that live in your brain forever … the poster of ‘Amélie’ was up in every teenage girl’s bedroom in 2007.”
She’s talked in past interviews about her appreciation for so-called “guilty pleasures” like Channing Tatum’s ab-tastic “Magic Mike XXL” and the Kirsten Dunst cheerleader masterpiece “Bring It On.” And “Starstruck” is loaded with references on everything from “The Graduate” to “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
”I think I’m very simplistic, maybe to my detriment, but when you can describe the plot to a film, to me that is a good film,” she explains of her criteria, adding that “with rom-coms … the simplicity in a lot of them is what makes them quite classic and timeless. ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is a very simple concept … with any genre, there’s good and bad to it, every single one. But [rom-coms] are unfairly maligned because, obviously, mostly women are the people who like it.”
But if there is one rom-com that Matafeo can’t get on board with, it’s the upcoming “Bridget Jones” movie follow-up “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.”
This isn’t because the franchise seems to have (controversially) killed off Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy, a curmudgeon who still loved our girl just as she was.
It’s because Matafeo wasn’t asked to be in it.
“I haven’t even watched the trailer because I’m so upset that nary a self-tape request has come through the f— door,” she says. “Have I not done enough to promote ‘Bridget Jones’ as canon? And not one whisper.”
