Matt Rife opened his 2023 in January by re-releasing his debut special (Only Fans) on 800 Pound Gorilla Media’s YouTube channel, a move designed at the time to get his face in front of more eyeballs. Rife ended the year by publicly telling a 6-year-old that Santa Claus isn’t real.
In between, Rife’s Only Fans racked up 13.8 million views there in addition to 11.8 million views on his own channel (25.6 million combined!)—making Rife the 800-pound gorilla in the room, dominating the comedy spotlight for better and (mostly) worse.
Rife was still finding his audience even in February, deciding to launch his second stand-up special, Matthew Steven Rife, on the niche PPV platform, Moment. He re-released that hour-plus on his YouTube channel in April, where it has recorded more than 18 million views.
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Then Netflix cashed in on Rife’s growing fame, resulting in his third comedy special in less than a year, November’s Natural Selection—an hour and four minutes that attracted 10.4 million views in its first two weeks and almost as many critical TikTok reaction videos.
Ah, yes, TikTok, where—more often than not—comedy went to die in 2023.
Rife’s seemingly overnight success may have been 15 years in the making (exhibits A and B include MTV’s Wild ’N Out from 2015-17 where he infamously hit on Zendaya or NBC’s Bring The Funny in 2019 where he flirted with married judge Chrissy Teigen), but because TikTok broke him big time (he has more than 18 million followers), his example somehow broke the brains of many other, mostly older comedians in the industry, who suddenly believed they needed their own crowd work clips to replicate Rife’s rise to fame.
Sam Morril included captioning and reaction shots for the crowd-work portions of his Netflix special. Joe List made a running joke of hoping to generate clips in his latest YouTube special. Even Joe Pera got in on the action.
A flood of crowd-work only specials this year hit the YouTube channels of Matteo Lane (3.1 million views since last Thanksgiving), Big Jay Oakerson (1.9 million views in eight months), Stavros Halkias (1.6 million views in seven months), Jessica Kirson, T.J. Miller, compilations from various shows by Morril and Mark Normand, plus at least a dozen others.
Kyle Kinane mocked this trend in his own social media, and told me earlier this year, “I hate bad crowd work and the fact that people will perceive it to be this easy bounce towards a viral clip. And so everybody’s putting out clips where I’m like, I would delete this from my phone if I took this at a show. You put it online? There’s that mentality of like, just as long as there’s content out there… I’m like, God, what a sea of shit we’ve created.”
In an interview this year with 1883 Magazine, Rife described his 2022 TikTok usage as sporadic, posting perhaps only once a month until that July, with a following of 200,000. “I’m watching this clip at dinner and I didn’t even think it was funny, I didn’t want to post it,” he recalled, but said his friend urged him to post it anyhow. “I did, and that video changed everything. It did 20 million views in two days and that video made every other video on my page go viral where they all got between 1 and 7 million views instantly. I just started this big chain reaction and now pretty much everything I post does between like 3 to 40 million views. It’s insane.”
So what’s the problem?
Gary Gulman lays it out in the opening minutes of his new Max special, Born on 3rd Base. “I just want to let the people in the front rows know that they are safe from me asking what they do for work,” he says. “I remember going to comedy shows when I was in high school and later and the comedian would ask somebody what they did for work and then proceed to ridicule their profession. And I just remember thinking, if I am ever in the front row at a comedy show and a comedian asks me what I do for work, I will stand up and say, ‘What do you do for work? I didn’t come here to be forcibly cast in your TikTok video, you lazy hack.’”
Matt Rife attends a New York Knicks game on Nov. 6, 2023.
Rich Schultz/GettySometimes comedians ask questions of the audience as a means to an end—the answer is irrelevant—serving only as a segue to the comedian’s next set-up and punchline, already planned. Sometimes crowd work merely fills time because the comedian hasn’t written enough jokes to fill their contractual obligation. And comedians who specialize in crowd work—like Paula Poundstone, who may have essentially invented it—use it as a magic trick, creating the illusion that they’re fast on their feet and oh so witty, when they’ve already likely heard enough prompts in the past to have rebuttals at the ready.
But the dirtiest little secret about crowd work? It’s not actually stand-up comedy, instead transforming the stand-up comedian into the thing they claim to hate the most and respect the least: Improvisers.
Moreover, the vitality of crowd-work clips not only feed into the basest fears of audience members (who even before social media existed, would ask comedy club staff NOT to sit them in the front row lest the comedians pick on them), but also further incentivize the worst audience members who love to heckle, because now they have ample evidence to believe they really are “helping” the comedian with their act.
Rife himself has said he released Walking Red Flag on his YouTube this June (10.8 million views and counting) hoping to put that chapter of his comedy brand behind him. And that informed his Netflix special, from his ill-advised opening joke mocking a restaurant hostess with a black eye to his closing remarks questioning anyone who thought he could only do crowd work.
So who’s to blame for this? Rife? Or TikTok?
“If anything, I feel bad for the TikTok stars,” Kinane told me. “Like alright, well, you have a lot of followers. How are you gonna monetize that? Well, we’ll put you in a comedy club. But they’re not stand-ups. They’re TikTok folks. And then they go and sell hundreds of tickets and people get there and are like, oh, yeah, you had 10 minutes of material and now you’re onstage for an hour. I don’t even blame them. I blame the managers or whoever gets a hold of them, just puts them out there to make that quick percentage off of them before they burn out or realize that they’re not stand-ups. Man, late-stage capitalism affects us all.”
It typically takes comedians at least a year, on average, to develop a new hour of their own material.
Even Rife knows that. As he told 1883: “Ideally, you want to put out a new special every year to 18 months and right now that’s what I strive for. We’ve done two specials in the past two years.” Then in only a few months, he put out both a crowd-work special and took Netflix’s offer to deliver a completely new hour. What could go wrong?!
“I’m happy for Matt Rife and his career,” Anthony Jeselnik said on a recent episode of his podcast. But he clarified that Rife’s comedy is clearly not for him. “His audience was like, you know, young girls and middle-aged girls, and older girls,” Jeselnik explained. “What’s fascinating to me is that in this special, he’s like, ‘No, I’m for guys now. This special’s for guys.’ It gives me a little bit of a feeling of Iggy Azalea trying to freestyle.”
Marc Maron, meanwhile, has derided Rife as “the new It Boy of shitty comedy”—and compared him to a previous ultra-popular comedy pariah Dane Cook.
Rife had all the makings of the Gen Z edition of Dane Cook, but at least Cook enjoyed the white-hot spotlight for a couple of years before enduring a big backlash. Cook toured arenas, hosted Saturday Night Live twice within 10 months and led three big comedy films.
Rife, meanwhile, pulled perhaps the quickest heel turn in comedy since Andrew “Dice” Clay, running to Jordan Peterson to appeal to his anti-woke fans. Now, Rife is co-starring in a new indie film opposite Jamie Kennedy as a young comedian who’s also an actual vampire. It’s called Don’t Suck.
Whoops, too late.
