Comedian Matt Rogers Shares His Cheeky Take on Christmas Albums By 'All These Little Pop Girls'
Here's looking at you Brit, Ari and Kelly.
If you’ve ever sat in your oversized sweater, by a roaring fire, holding a cup of hot chocolate wondering "how much does every pop star who has a Christmas album actually love Christmas? Or is it all just a ruse to make more money?" you are not alone. Matt Rogers channels this exact thought in Matt Rogers: Have You Heard of Christmas? The special premieres on Showtime on Demand and streaming Dec 2 at 10 p.m. ET. Matt is best known for his role in the Showtime series I Love That for You and the rom-com Fire Island. And his chart topping podcast, Las Culturistas that he co-hosts with SNL star Bowen Yang.
His special won’t be one of those that is soon forgotten and confused with a fever dream (Does anyone else remember that Target had a Christmas special with an ice skating snowman? I’m not the only one right?). It’s effortlessly charming and sweet with a little spice without being too mean. Rogers does a great job of making sure you’re in on the joke with him even if you’re a big Christmas lover. It’s fun to laugh at ourselves and the world around us sometimes. I feel each year we say, especially now but, especially now! We were lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with Matt Rogers to talk about his special, the King(s) of Christmas and why the holidays are such a horny time.
Got to say, I love the special. Were you a kid who would always make everyone watch you perform during the holidays?
Not really. But whenever I was around my cousins, we definitely did dance contests. We loved to choreograph a dance. I remember one time there was an iconic dance that we did when we were on a vacation in Pennsylvania to ‘Larger than Life’ by the Backstreet Boys. We won a talent show with it.
We were sort of the stars of the world, like Pines Lake Resort, not for nothing. And then other than that we would just videotape ourselves. Like no one would watch us perform. It was more us with a video camera like making little movies. I was definitely a little moviemaker kid. I loved that stuff.
I appreciate that your special has songs for those with and without loving family members. Did you do that on purpose?
Yeah. You know, I just really wanted to take the piss out of every element of Christmas. So there's stuff about the religious element of Christmas. There's stuff about the characters of Christmas. I think something that's very synonymous with going home for the holidays is, you know, especially in the year of our Lord 2022, that politically we don't always get along.
I wanted to sort of sensationalize and maximize what it means to have family conflict. And so that resulted in a song called ‘I'ma Have Your Back this Christmas’ about expecting allyship among your friends when you go home and have a difficult time and a little to let your friends know that means you have to aid and abet me when I burn down the house of my uncle who I don't agree with. So that's maybe taking it to the extreme. But in a radicalized America, what can we expect?
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Exactly. So I need these songs to play at my holiday party better. So are we going to be able to stream them?
Not this year, but I would stay tuned for more advancements in the Christmas project. That is Matt Rogers, the seasonally ubiquitous Christmas prince. So maybe let's think of next year as a time when we can maybe talk about, I don't know, an album or something.
OK, I'll sit down next year about it. Well, I'm not going to say that you did this during the special, but if you were to have to cry on demand, what technique would you use?
Honestly, I cried earlier today thinking about how grateful and emotional I am that this is coming out, to be honest with you. So something that really gets me there and gets me there at the end of the special every single time is when I turn to Henry and say how grateful and thankful I am and how indebted I am to him for his talent and his partnership and collaboration.
He is my actual ex-boyfriend, so it is a very thick relationship that we have, but we have fully made it through. I believe it was gay people that once said “love wins.” So that really proves to be true with the special.
Well as the Prince of Christmas. Who would you consider the king? You can't say Santa.
You probably tie between Nat King Cole and Big Crosby. They'll probably always be the Kings. The Queen is, of course, Mariah Carey. And I'm the prince, for sure. And then the princess. I don't know. It's all these little pop girls with Christmas singles. Your Britney Spears, your Ariana Grande. You know, your Kelly Clarkson. You know, they're all of them.
It really feels like every pop star has a Christmas album, or at least a Christmas single, which is another reason why I thought it was so funny and wanted to do this idea because it feels like all these Christmas artists like that are really just pop stars throughout the year. They would have you believe that they actually love Christmas when it's probably their record label being like time to cash in on the cultural phenomenon that is Christmas, right?
And then they're all like, Yeah, sure, I like money too. So that's sort of where the comedy comes from for me, is like this idea that we're all, “celebrating Christmas” when really it's that we all just want a fun, little easy album. I mean, the songs are already written for a lot of these girls.
They're just like singing old songs a lot of times.
Exactly.
Related: The 200 Best Christmas Songs of All Time
But you made it harder on yourself. You wrote a lot of your songs.
I wrote all my songs. Not a cover inside because we couldn't afford them.
Were there any that you had to scrap or were there any themes that didn't quite make it into songs?
No. There are songs in my live show that I do that I don't do in the special. And if people want to see those, they can come see me on tour. I'm doing 14 cities this December. I'm starting in Atlanta. I'm finishing up. I'm in New York, so I'm all over the country and they can check out my site to see that.
But basically I pretty much have done the same show since like 2019, I would say 2018, 2019. I've been doing the show since 2017 and it changed a little bit in those two years. But this is the Christmas show that I've always done, so I feel good about them and they're here to stay. In terms of this album, this is a complete album. It's not streamable yet, but it is a complete album.
There's a lot of horny songs.
I'm a horny guy.
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Would you say Christmas is the horniest holiday? If not, which holiday is?
Christmas is definitely the horniest holiday because it's when you're like, you know, like. So when you get with your family and you're, like, isolated, like, that's when the horniest, like, DMs start to fly. Like, I don't know about you, but like, some people have come out of the woodwork on Dec. 27 to let you know they're horny for you.
You get so fresh and forward in the mediums and then when it comes to real life, it's like everyone's real tentative. But I do think that Christmas makes people really horny just because you're like home and like, not doing much. You know what I mean?
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What is your favorite Christmas special?
I don't know if I necessarily have one. I guess I would say my favorite content is probably the ‘Grinch’ with Jim Carrey. But to be honest with you, the reason I like doing the special is because while I do love and appreciate Christmas, I'm so exhausted and like over Christmas, by the time it's really going.
So my special is sort of people that love Christmas, but for people who also think Christmas is a lot and want to drag it a little bit, and that's kind of how I am with everything I love. Like I always have the joke about the thing I love the most.
[Very sarcastically] I notice your special did not pass the Bechdel test.
I think that Alison Bechdel would agree with me that in much the way that ‘Fire Island’ passes the test when two queer Asian men are talking about Alice Munro's story “Power,” that when a gay man is on stage, as Martha May debating sexism in her own mind and like sort of wrestling with feminism from where she sits passes as well.
I think that the way that I empower Mrs. Claus and allow her to really speak truth to power, to her husband, I have to earn some points there. So I don't think Alison Bechdel would be upset with my special. And I actually would love if she watched it. I would love to hear what she thinks about it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
