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, Have You Heard of Christmas?, comedian Matt Rogers, dressed in a metallic tuxedo, stands onstage at Joe’s Pub to deliver his interpretation of the holiday’s central message. “Every year, Santa knows just what to say / When all of the elves claim the bag’s way too tight / And maybe we shouldn’t do this tonight,” he sings, his lips curling with naughty pleasure. “Nobody asks why Santa has so much lube,” he continues, nearly bent in half, eyes closed with mock horniness. It’s one of the first of Rogers’s original songs in the special, and like most of his numbers, it’s sung with the intense sincerity of a starlet who knows her entire cultural worth is tied up in her sex appeal. In the special’s opening number, a more upbeat banger, each verse is an ever-more explicit description of hooking up with someone: “Intoxicate / Alleviate / I want to feel you from inside.” And then comes the chorus, delivered with an arm flourish and a twirl: “Also it’s Christmas! Did I mention that it’s Christmas in this club?”
Christmas and comedy are fond bedfellows — much like many of the people Rogers sings about in this special — but the most familiar versions of Christmas comedy treat the holiday as a situation. There’s the National Lampoon version, 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 ruined. There’s also “awkward-comedy Christmas” (gifting cringe), “capitalism-commentary Christmas” (shopping but make it satire), “sketch-comedy Christmas” (if Netflix doesn’t make a Christmas special of I Think You Should Leave, they’re bigger idiots than I thought), and, of course, “Christmas myths are real” (Santa exists, and that is funny).
What Rogers does with Have You Heard of Christmas? is somehow headier and also completely empty-headed. Two things can be true! He’s doing an elaborate, queered play on Christmas as performance; he’s pointing off into the distance and yelling, “Is that Hoda?” Yes, Rogers is sending up the Christmas industrial complex and the soppy sentimentality of it all. But he’s also playing himself as an ambitious, ladder-climbing Christmas-diva wannabe, singing about the warm treasures of December coziness in ways he knows will sell. In the special’s several short interstitial sketches (featuring New York alt-comedy figures such as Natalie Walker, Pat Regan, and Jo Firestone), Rogers demands they turn him into the Mariah Carey–crowned “Prince of Christmas.” The special is his attempt at a big break. He’s going to rake in Christmas money for years! It’s exactly the sort of scheme that shows up in Lifetime Christmas movies!
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 (the song is from God’s point of view, and the chorus is “I am real / I am real / I am real / I am real”). 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. The point isn’t that Christmas is hot, though that is certainly on the table. It’s Christmas as a performance of feelings and feelings as a pass-through to salability and Rogers again and again sailing way past the mark that would make that actually feasible. One number, which Rogers describes as an original Carey song written for the Jim Carrey version of The Grinch that didn’t make the movie’s final cut, is sung from the point of view from a Whoville MILF. Another song (“Rockafella Center”) is mostly a list of NBC celebrities and how weird it is to turn a giant tree into a tourist destination. Each song has its own angle on Christmas sentiment, and in every case Rogers overshoots the mark past the point of discomfort and well into hysterical absurdity. He mugs and winks at the camera with chummy holiday good cheer, and with every little nod and smarmy wrinkle of his nose, the joke of his cynical Christmas album expands wider and wider like a beautiful blown-glass ornament that miraculously never shatters.
Have You Heard of Christmas? is incredible. It is buoyant and shiny and memorable, and by making it a musical special, Rogers captures that ineffable thing about the holiday that’s so captivating and inane and hard to hit. The special’s title song, “Have You Heard of Christmas?,” starts from the premise of Rogers asking strangers on the street why they’re in such a bad mood. The song’s main question is meant sincerely: Why be such a stinker when Christmas exists? It’s a holiday about children laughing! But, as the song plays out, it becomes clear that Rogers himself has no idea what Christmas is actually about, and he includes increasingly wrong details about the exact origin of the holiday (“Santa and Jesus … they were best, best friends!”). But the best line of the song is from the chorus, when Rogers asks, “Have you heard of Christmas? / We all know that Christmas sound,” then shifts into a falsetto to moan, “Christmas sounds like ‘Ooooo-ooooo-oooo.’”
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. By the time it escalates to a throaty “mmmmm-mmmm-mmm” as Rogers transitions the lyric to an account of what the “five disciples” said one night, it’s an encapsulation of everything this special wants to achieve. It is supremely stupid and completely charming, a pure instinctual translation of the deepest meaning of Christmas tied up in a glittery bow and then coated in lube and feathers and sent as a PR package to a carefully curated list of influencers.
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. Christmas does sound like “Ooooo-ooooo-oooo.”
