New Zealander Rose Matafeo has won the coveted best comedy show award at the Edinburgh festival fringe. Steve Coogan, one of Matafeo’s comic heroes, presented her with the £10,000 prize at a ceremony in Edinburgh on Saturday.
“I just wanted to do a fun, daft show,” Matafeo said. “I make comedy for women like me, in their 20s and looking for fun, and the response to the show has been amazing. I think a lot of women were going, yeah, that’s me.”
The 26-year-old performer, of Samoan and Scottish-Croatian heritage, is only the fifth woman to take the title. Her fellow nominees were the award’s most diverse yet, with comics from Australia, America, Russia, India, Ireland and Britain in contention.
The winning show, Horndog, is about being a woman in her 20s looking for passionate relationships, rather than love. Matafeo talks about growing up as a geeky, film-obsessed teenager who had no luck with boys. When she did start dating she would become slightly obsessed, or as she says: “Go hard or go home.” Nica Burns, director of the awards, said Horndog is “an utterly original show, a totally hilarious spoof with a completely unexpected ending”.
Matafeo added: “They haven’t seen a lot of comedy like that before and I think a lot [of women] have felt comedy clubs were not very welcoming spaces for them. But I think that’s changing. Comedy is becoming more diverse – just look at the shortlists this year. There are some really great young female comics out there, and I am very proud of being a woman of colour.”
Described by the Guardian critic Brian Logan as “a blissfully funny and charismatic performer”, Matafeo had returned to the Scottish capital from her native Auckland after a successful show last year and was one of a strong contingent of straight-talking female performers from Australia and New Zealand performing this year. Alongside Matafeo on the shortlist of seven contenders picked from the festival line-up was Felicity Ward, an established act from New South Wales. Last year, Australian Hannah Gadsby shared the prize with John Robins, who attended Saturday’s ceremony.Matafeo also beat strong competion from two former nominees for the award. Kieran Hodgson, who put together an unusual political show about the roots of Brexit called ‘75, was on the shortlist for shows in 2015 and 2016, while Ahir Shah, in the running this year for his stand-up set about visiting his deported Indian grandmother in the wake of the Windrush scandal, was also nominated last year.
The other three nominees were Alex Edelman, Glenn Moore and Larry Dean.
The 2018 award was given in memory of Sean Hughes, who died last October at the age of 51. He won the prize in 1990, when it was known as the Perrier award as it was sponsored by the mineral water brand.
Reminiscing after the ceremony, Coogan, who won the prize in 1992 with John Thomson for a character comedy show, recalled how comics like he and Hughes loved the fringe in the 1990s. “It was a very special time, and people like Sean, Eddie Izzard, Paul O’Grady, Jo Brand, Jack Dee have all gone on to do great things. It felt like a new chapter in comedy and the Edinburgh fringe was the focal point for it.”
