A life in stitches
Like many comedians, Rose Matafeo reckons she is more of an introvert than the extroverted “horndog” who wowed this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Michele Hewitson caught up with the rising star and crochet exponent.
Like many comedians, Rose Matafeo reckons she is more of an introvert than the extroverted “horndog” who wowed this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Michele Hewitson caught up with the rising star and crochet exponent.
Rose Matafeo likes a bit of bleak. “I do. I really do,” she says, on the phone from London, where she now lives. “Oh, I’m relatively bleak.” So here’s a funny joke: the relatively bleak Auckland-raised comedian won this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award. She had another thought about her self-proclaimed bleakness: “Just because I speak loudly on stage and scream and shout and all that shit probably doesn’t seem all that bleak.
“But,” she says, cheerfully, “I’ve got a dark side.”
She realised, she told me in 2015, that “I might be an introvert, ha, ha, because I took a test online. I’m like, ‘I’m sure I’m an extrovert’. Then I read all this stuff, such as: ‘When you go out with people and you’re talking to people, do you get energy from them or do you feel your energy is being sapped?’ And I feel like my energy is being sapped.”
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival comedy award is, as the Listener’s Books & Culture editor Russell Baillie tweeted, pretty much the comedy equivalent of the Man Booker. Steve Coogan has won it; so have Dylan Moran and Hannah Gadsby. The Guardian called Matafeo “a near-perfect comedian”.
She met Coogan – he presented her award, a cheque for £10,000 and “a big plastic award thing”. She came over all fan girl. “It was absolutely crazy. He gave me a hug and said ‘congratulations’ and I’m, like, ‘Nice to meet you.’” She says this in a squeaky little voice, like a tweenie meeting Taylor Swift. “Then I gave an awful speech and went home. It was shit, I had nothing prepared. I forgot to thank people. It was a bit of a disaster, really. A true indication of how unexpected it was.”
She loves Coogan. So do I. But what’s funny about him? His comedy is so bleak and sad, isn’t it? “Well, yeah. But I think that’s my favourite type of comedy – that utter bleakness.
“But, no, maybe I’m not bleak. I’m hyper-emotional. Maybe that’s the problem.”
That might be a handy trait for a comedian. Is it all right being hyper-emotional? “Yeah, if it’s funny – only if it’s funny. But I think I have no problem sharing the personal side. Most observational comedy, I think, has to be a bit emotional and a little bit true, and it seems that I’m very much that kind of comedian now.”
We can fairly safely say that she is our most celebrated horndog (the name of the show for which she won the award). I don’t actually know what a horndog is, I tell her. “There are,” she says, “definitions of it on the internet.” That is just mischief-making.
The person she is on stage is, of course, a heightened version of herself. “Yeah, absolutely I think it is. I’m not loud at all. In real life, I’m very shy and quiet. I’m not very shy and quiet! But I’m not that energetic. However you think about me on stage, just think that I’m 10 times worse than that in real life.”
People who see her on stage often fall in love with her. They think she’s their new best friend, or that she is just like them. In real life, she is an awful person, or so she says. “I’m awful, guys!” But then she fails to offer proof of her awfulness.
What she really means, I think, is that she is really boring. She likes to do crochet. She plans to spend some of her prize money on an armchair. An armchair! “I want to get an armchair that I can sleep in and sit in and it’s, like, a beautiful colour and I can do all my work in it but not do work in it.” No, she’d sit in it and watch the telly and do her crochet.
“I’m a relatively ambitious person,” she
“I’m not crazy. I’m genuinely ambitious to keep doing this for as long as I can. I completely understand if I can’t.”