Comedian Matt Rogers has created a satire of the celebrity Christmas album called Have You Heard of Christmas? He’s best known as the co-host of the podcast Las Culturistas with Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang.
“That's the thing about Christmas: You have to be maximalist about it. … It's a big culture — capital B, capital C. … What's so funny about it, to me, is the excess of it all. … It really doesn't matter what you feel about Christmas, you are going to be participating in it, whether you like it or not,” he tells KCRW.
As a kid on Long Island, he recalls, he loved the gifts, family time, music — but he recognized that it was a particularly American money-making machine.
Rogers says New York’s Rockefeller Center perfectly represents capitalism during the holidays, with all the retail, ice-skating rink, art, and annual Christmas tree lighting. Rogers’ song “RockaFella Centa” is an homage to the location.
“I said, ‘What if I did a Vogue-inspired Madonna breakdown of every icon that's worked there?’ … That's the only way to maximize the stupidity of this song, which is just celebrating and glorifying the Rockefeller Center for all its romantic beauty.”
Bowen Yang is part of this song — the two met at NYU, when Rogers was in a sketch comedy group and Yang was in an improv group.
“I think the groups were like, ‘Oh, yeah, you're the two gay ones, you'll be best friends.’ And they put us together. And we resented that at first. … Then, I think, we were at some after-party for one of the comedy shows, and a Nicki Minaj song came on that we both knew all the words to. And we started just screaming at each other. And I think we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, maybe we will be best friends just because we're gay.’ And then we realized we had so much more in common than just being off-book on Nicki Minaj. And we became best friends pretty quickly. And we've done the podcast since 2016.”
Rogers and Yang didn’t expect Las Culturistas to gain the fame it did. “We really thought the whole podcast thing was over in 2016. We were like, ‘Is it lame that we're starting a podcast now?’ [We came] to find, pretty immediately as it caught on like wildfire in our community, the podcast thing was very much not done; and that people would listen to it and it would become the thing that launched our careers. So really, best decision we ever made.”
He continues, “Everyone I meet that comes to the shows, they really do have this connection to the podcast … especially through the pandemic when people were not as socially integrated as they wanted to be, and just didn't have that ability to socialize and ability to even just hear the voices of their friends.”
A regular segment on the podcast is “I Don’t Think So, Honey,” which Rogers describes as a one-minute, cathartic rant about something “that you feel has to be dragged, like you got to get this off your chest.”
Matt Rogers is performing at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel on December 21.