Matt Rife: Natural Selection
Or what happens when you go to war with yourself, but don't quite know why
Matt Rife’s special Natural Selection is fascinating on multiple levels except the most important one, being funny.
Rife is constantly at a remove from his audience throughout the special, and that starts from joke one, with the infamous domestic violence bit that has now gone viral. I can’t add much to the existing discourse there, the joke isn’t a good one. What’s interesting, to me, is the statement after the joke about “testing the waters” to see if the audience will be on his side for the rest of the night. Rife presents like he is already preparing for a fight, but the question is why? He isn’t a political comedian. None of the identities he presents are inherently radical, unless being hot in comedy is a newly created one. Yet at the immediate start of his debut special1, he’s acting like he’s on the verge of annihilation by forces unseen.
Maybe I’m a rube, but I believe that Rife believes that he is under attack. Unfortunately, it's a battle he is creating in his own head that didn’t have to happen. One that stems from becoming famous through TikTok and acquiring a mostly female audience, two things that the comedy establishment Rife wants to be a part of doesn’t respect.
Usually an artist “challenges” their audience after creating years of work in one style and wanting to evolve to something greater. That is not what is going on here. Instead, it feels like Rife is less challenging his audience and more throwing a tantrum in front of them. I can only guess the psychological reasons for that response, but the evidence is in the material. Bitter, complain-y and generally directed towards the people who got him a Netflix special in the first place, women. Rife got the success he dreamed of but is clearly not happy about the vessel that carried him there.
This hour plays to none of Rife’s strengths because he has determined those strengths are the enemy, alongside his audience. Onstage, his best attribute is his ability to connect with a crowd in a way few other comics can. So, of course, he is performing on a stage seemingly designed to be as far from the audience as humanly possible. When we do get cuts to the audience, they are bathed in darkness so total they might as well be completely invisible. This feels like a choice, but not one made conscious enough to be compelling. Roger Waters built an entire fucking wall to make the point he felt disconnected from his audience, Rife sends that message passive-aggressively through his material and it doesn’t work because I am not sure he understands the level of rebellion inside himself and how it manifests in his material.
Part of that misunderstanding stems from the paradox of performing live comedy in a theater.
Not all laughs are created equal. Performing in a theater in front of your fans for a special they know is being taped creates a “Laughter Floor” that is almost impossible to crash through. Its a mixture of audience goodwill (They paid money and time to see you and want this to be a good night) and audience intelligence (They know when the laughs are supposed to occur in a joke and respond accordingly. Same way you do when a family member or co-worker tells an unfunny story, yet you know when to provide a polite chuckle).
Get a couple thousand people rooting for you in a room and a rudimentary knowledge of comedy rhythms and you will get laughs, they will just be more of the “heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh” variety than the more surprising “HAHAHAahhhhHAHAHAH” type that are more spontaneous and genuine. Further proof of this is the phenomenon of people “doing well” at their first stand-up performance because they do a bringer at a club filled with their friends. Laughter is more meritocratic than most things, but it is not wholly so. You can rig it.
You can do this yourself. The next comedy special you watch or live show you attend, train your ear on the laughter after each joke. How does it sound in a vacuum? What about as a sequence, do the laughs start to sound the same in tone, length and volume? Do you notice variations that break those patterns? What about comparing them to the comic before and after? Once you look for it you can’t stop noticing it.
That is why the material “works” live in a theater but not played back from the various devices people use to consume comedy. Most of the bits are very “first thought” opinions. Astrology is stupid because planets can’t care about you. Having to put a bag under your seat on an airplane is dumb because if the plane crashes we are all dead anyway. There just isn’t much meat on the bone to these premises and the refrains of “heh-heh-heh-heh” in response to them prove it.
This is a long way of saying I can see how Rife taped this special thinking it was good, when really he had done well in a room stacked in his favor and the material couldn’t survive impact with a much less generous audience.
When it comes to comedians, I’m always looking for energy. I still remember seeing Doug Stanhope in a dingy bar in Binghamton ten years ago and how electric the room felt. This energy isn’t reserved for famous comics either2. I saw the comic Kat Smith at a local Brooklyn show called Backyard Baseball and witnessed that same electricity as she pummeled us with a brilliant bit about an ex-partner and the specific sexual fetish he wanted her to fulfill. There was a charge in the air and everyone felt it. I know because when that energy exists, you reflexively start looking around at people to confirm “Hey, you are feeling this too right?”.
Embarrassing as it may be to admit now, I sensed that similar feeling seeing Matt Rife crowd-work clips online. This was a more secondhand experience, I got that energy by watching the crowd and seeing how energetic they were and therefore started feeling it myself. Energy is addictive in that way. People were going fucking wild at his shows in a way that you don’t see for other comedians. It reminded me of early Eddie Murphy specials where the comic almost has to settle the crowd down immediately because they are bringing too much energy and comedy needs spaces of silence to make punchlines hit.
There is none of that here, until a post-credits rapid fire minute of Rife doing crowd-work. That minute of material at the end felt more real, personable and vital than the hour before it. It was Rife connecting with the crowd, being funny and honestly acting like a man who felt love from his audience and turned it into comedy rocket fuel. It reminded me of what I even felt compelling about him in the first place.
There are two Matts inside of Rife. “Crowd-work Matt” craves a connection with others due to his years of feeling shunned, but channels it in a celebratory way the audience feels and gives back to the room times ten. “Bit Matt” also wants that same connection, but feels disconnected from the audience and creates from a reactionary/defensive perspective that leads to more bitter, self-absorbed material. These two Matts are clearly at war with each other, why else end a special with the line, “But what do I know, I only do crowd work right?” and drop the mic? It's a response that implies shame for a vital part of who Rife is, no wonder his special has triggered such vitriol. He went against the part of himself that provides the joy in his act.
I hope Matt Rife figures out a way to synthesize these two parts of himself. To see that “Crowd-work Matt’s” ability to connect with people is an incredible conduit that can allow “Bit Matt” to get the buy-in needed to create challenging, meaningful works. This special drew a line in the sand between these parts with disastrous results.
He has a few self-produced ones on YouTube, but this is clearly framed as his coming out party.
Preface, I am never going to critically review any local NYC comics in this newsletter. I think it's in poor taste and, more honestly, so obviously self-sabotaging for my comedy aspirations that even this writer with Borderline Personality Disorder can see that bad idea coming a mile away. I will highlight excellence though.