Matt Rogers's special, 'Have You Heard of Christmas?,' is the gift that keeps on giving. kvanaren writes
Just in time to celebrate this magical season of warmth and togetherness, a new Christmas special arrives to remind us of the most important truths about this very special time of year. In his new Showtime hour,, dressed in a metallic tuxedo, stands onstage at Joe’s Pub to deliver his interpretation of the holiday’s central message.
Christmas and comedy are fond bedfellows — much like many of the people Rogers sings about in this special — but theversion, in which Christmas becomes the backdrop for family shenanigans and frantic last-minute shopping, travel, romance, secrets, and elaborate showcases that need to be pulled off or else everything is. There’s also “awkward-comedy Christmas” , “capitalism-commentary Christmas” , “sketch-comedy Christmas” , and, of course, “Christmas myths are real” .
But unlike the Scrooge-y protagonists of most Christmas stories, there is no lesson to be learned here. There’s no arc of redemption. There’s just Rogers, belting his heart out on a song meant to appeal to the more religious side of the holiday . More often than not, Rogers’s Christmas is about sex appeal, but it’s sexiness that’s gone just a bit too far, as if someone took “Santa Baby” and added a verse about fingering.
That lyric has the delicious quality of a Christmas ditz giving a book report on something he’s never read — that empty set of “ooo”s is a perfect, crystalline, platonic ideal of nothingness that feels as if it should be something, and it makes me giggle with the helplessness of a kid being tickled.
Because, in truth, it’s appealing to pretend we are better than the chintzy, commercialized excesses of capitalist holiday schmaltz. It’s a great holiday to joke about — every single piece of it is absurd. And yet it is immune to mockery. It floats along inside an unburstable bubble of collective cultural imagination, too big to fail and impossible not to find moving in one way or another. Rogers is right.
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