Karl Puschmann: LOL? A look at Rose Matafeo and Michael McIntyre's comedy specials

Rose Matafeo in her award-winning comedy show Horndog, streaming now on Neon. Photo / Neon

COMMENT:

I don't get people that don't like stand-up comedy. I mean, how can you not like having a laugh? Are these miserable killjoys having a laugh? The evidence suggests not.

This week has been a surprisingly great one for comedy fans. Not one, not three, but two of the biggest comedians from two different countries dropped brand new comedy specials onto two different streaming services.

Are you ready to laugh? Always. Do you have subscriptions to both Neon and Netflix? I hope so because then you're ready to roll... on the floor laughing that is! Or, #ROFL in internet speak.

How the internet speaks both informs and plays a big part in local comedy heroine Rose Matafeo's show Horndog. Like an elderly gent waiting for the Viagra to kick in, this stand-up special popped up surprisingly on Neon earlier in the week.

The show's title, instantly memorable and attention grabbing, leads you to expect a routine dripping in salacious, sex-mad humour, like a modern update of Austin Powers all "yeah babies!'' and questions about whether or not you've, in fact, been made horny. Baby.

This is not that. Horndog is instead a charmingly dorky, anxiously neurotic, examination of Matafeo's lust for love and the lengths she's gone too in her attempts to secure that love which ultimately led to that love being squashed like an irritating mosquito attached to your arm and feasting on your very life blood. The sexiest it gets is a poorly mimed re-enactment of her inability to masturbate without getting distracted. Racy stuff.

Instead, she rants against motivational quotes splattered over women's everything, relives the glory days of early 2000s internet culture and admits that carrying a leather briefcase to college as opposed to a, ya know, school bag, is probably a big part of why she wasn't ever asked out on any dates.

Matafeo's a charismatic, engaging and fun performer. She can switch from maniacal babble to self-deprecating bewilderment to outraged loud anger to genuine emotional heft without every coming across as phony baloney or feeling anything less than completely real.

When she was performing the show here, first at the comedy fest and then touring with it, a couple of years ago our reviewer called it, "a high energy hour of jokes and stories". And that's pretty spot on. It's easy to see why she won the comedy's biggest award, the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Award, in 2018. It's a starmaking show that feels very "now". Even if, at this point, it is two years old.

Browsing Netflix a couple of days later I spotted Michael McIntyre: Showman and flicked it on. I didn't know much about this chap but I had seen a couple of his routines shared on Facebook.

It was all very genteel stuff. For example a seven-minute bit on the trial that is trying to leave the house when you have kids, or, say, the performalistic ritual of choosing wine in a restaurant.

Relatable and obvious and almost guaranteed to be stuff you've heard 100 times before. If you were feeling ungenerous you could call them tired. But - and this is the important part - they are incredibly funny.

It's the way he tells 'em. Acting out all the parts with gestures flying and voices changing and centring it all with the - and stop me if you've heard this one before - the exasperated bafflement of a bewildered husband and man.

McIntyre's real skill is drawing out the lead-up to the punchline that you know is coming. As soon as he introduces a topic, like choosing an internet password or how the New Zealand accent - yes, patriots, we get an extended shout-out! - makes words like "six" and "deck" sound rather naughty, you know exactly where the road he's walking down leads.

Does that make it any less funny? Nope!

But what wasn't funny were the stories about his travels in Asia, which come complete with accents, impressions and pulled faces. For such a very British comedian it feels like bad panto. Yes, the gags come mostly at his expense - a proclaimed resemblance to a North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un or his confusion at a massage spa - but that doesn't really mean he can get away with it.

For a performer that's car salesman slick it's a poor miscalculation in a set that's otherwise perfectly calibrated for maximum performance and boasts a high laugh-per-minute ratio.

While both specials are coming from wildly different places and perspectives- a young woman of colour self-examining her life's choices and a white middle-aged man navigating the trivialities of domestic bliss - there's a human commonality between the shows; they're both funny as. No kidding.