Matt Rife Works a Crowd of His Own Making

Photo: Mathieu Bitton/Netflix

The opening joke of Matt Rife’s Netflix special, Natural Selection, is set at a restaurant in Baltimore, a city Rife describes as “ratchet.” The hostess has a black eye, Rife tells the crowd, which prompts one of Rife’s companions to wonder why she’s been assigned to greet people instead of being moved into the kitchen where patrons can’t see her face. “Yeah,” Rife tells his friend, “but I feel like if she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.” The crowd laughs loudly, shocked but also excited. That joke suggests the rest of the hour might have more of the same: danger and naughtiness and crossed lines. (And misogyny and a white guy relying on Black vernacular.) But as the first burst of laughter is still rolling, Rife says he’s “just testing the waters, seeing if y’all are gonna be fun or not … I figure if we start the show with domestic violence, the rest of the show should be smooth sailing.”

This is the posture Rife holds for the rest of the hour. He’s in a defensive stance: Will the audience be on board with him? Will they revolt? Will they be “fun”? Sometimes that defensiveness manifests as timidity, and sometimes as aggression. But throughout, Rife holds an adversarial position against the crowd who fills Washington, D.C.’s 3,000-seat Constitution Hall, and whose approval Rife longs for but whose judgment and worldview he finds suspect. A comedian’s cynicism toward an audience is nothing new, but Rife is part of a vanguard of young comedians whose fame has come largely through building a social-media following, which is something this show wrestles with. Now 28 years old and recording his first special for a mainstream platform, Rife seems to have arrived here on a speed run through comedic disquietude toward his own fans. As a result, Natural Selection is half uninspiring dick jokes, half screed against the injustice of online haters, and entirely underwhelming.

The dick jokes are the easiest to assess, in much the same way that they’re the easiest jokes to make. Rife has a few different versions. Some are more focused on size, some on masturbation, and some on the challenge of making women orgasm, which are really just dick jokes where the nerve bundle is a slightly different shape. The longest of them (see? dick jokes!) are a section where he imagines being rubbed off by monsters who lurk under his bed, then another story about finding his stepfather’s collection of porn VHS tapes in a closet. The ideas Rife plays with most clearly are being young and figuring out how to feel about sexuality, and in each joke there’s a looming, menacing figure — the monster, the stepfather — whose threat is neutralized by ejaculating. If Rife has spent time pondering what that might suggest about the role of sex in his internal conceptions of safety and power, that self-reflection doesn’t show up in the writing.

It’s tempting to get very Freudian here, and yes, sometimes a dick joke is just a dick joke. But sometimes it’s also a safe haven in a world where jokes about politics, race, gender, pronouns, and emotional vulnerability feel like treacherous, intimidating territory. The dick joke and its extended family of jokes about semen, ejaculation, masturbation, and penetration somewhat ironically become warm, reliable caves to hide inside. They’re dick jokes as a security blanket. And they work — the audience roars, and Rife can neatly thread his monster-masturbation bit together with his stepdad-porn bit, and the whole thing is juvenile, unremarkable, and nowhere near as pointy as that opening line about the woman with the black eye. Too much of Rife’s material here just punctuates setups with heavily pronounced words, like noting that his nephew is autistic “as fuck” or suggesting that his stepdad won’t notice a missing VHS, then saying “wrong!” They’re cadences that create spaces for laughter, but they’re not developed joke writing. There’s no new idea or shift in perspective; there’s no underlying theme for a punch line to reveal. Rife’s previous YouTube specials venture into hairier territory on issues like transphobia and race, and often those jokes do falter. But at least they’re faltering after having tried something. This Netflix special is full of overtly safe premises, as though the thought of reaching new viewers caused Rife to retreat into defensive conservatism.

Elsewhere, that defensiveness curdles into antagonism, especially toward the end, as Rife invokes the wrath of the online hater. Consuming the last quarter of the special, the joke is nominally about the unpleasantness of a particular flight to Vancouver. As the story unfolds, every element of the trip works against Rife’s comfort. A flight attendant is militant about the correct placement of Rife’s backpack under the seat. He’s sharing space with a child and an overweight person. No one, by his telling, will just let him be — he wants to sleep, this kid is bothering him, and the flight attendant refuses to see Rife’s side of the argument, which is that his backpack is less of a safety hazard than the overweight person sitting in his aisle. In the next segment of the joke, Rife turns on in-flight Wi-Fi to complain about this flight attendant, and it’s here where his real grievance seems to kick in. Lots of people get very mad at him online, and Rife, because he is a public figure (a phrase he pronounces with eye-rolling and a whining tone), is not supposed to respond.

All the chill, phallic delight is gone, exchanged for real animus toward these online trolls flooding his timeline. In the telling of the joke, these commenters aren’t yelling at him about his comedy. They’re angry at him for breaking the rules, for being inconsiderate to others, and for making a flight attendant’s job harder. Finally, he says, he snaps. “What I’ve learned through therapy or whatever” — more eye-rolling — “is that I’m a very defensive person.” Based on her profile picture, Rife decides that the worst of the trolls is “a heavier-set woman,” so he proceeds to make a comment about her presumed body size, and then becomes even more furious when the commenter accuses him of body-shaming and demands that Rife be canceled. “Bitch, you can’t cancel me!” he says. “I’m not your gym membership!”

This, at least, is shaped like a joke, but the rest of it notably lacks the kind of humorous reframing or conscious construction that would make any of it into material. There’s so much room to poke at the contradictions and awkward hypocrisies in his need to engage with social media and his dislike of the people who also engage, and if he’d given more thought to it, the realization that he comes off as an enormous asshole might’ve been an exciting opportunity to twist the story into new directions. Instead, it’s just baldly, nakedly what it is: a guy who’s really, really frustrated by what happens when he feels like people don’t get him. It’s not explicitly a joke about people who dislike Rife’s comedy, but that awareness lurks just underneath this story about people who’ve gotten mad about a backpack. They’re not fun, those commenters. They’re unwilling to play along and just let the rules slide. They’d hate that domestic-violence joke. What’s more, they see it as their right to insert themselves into Rife’s jokes, to give feedback and be vocal about what they do and don’t like. Rife is stuck with them: At one point, he says he hates social media just before acknowledging that his massive social-media presence is why any of them have to come out to see him. But that doesn’t mean he likes them, and it certainly doesn’t mean he trusts them to respond to material more risky than half an hour on semen-stiffened towels.

Natural Selection is a special in dialogue with Rife’s audience, a guarded and self-justifying response to the fan base that’s brought him to this place, about his open frustration with them. It can’t be actual dialogue, though, because Rife no longer wants to allow them to say anything. He’s direct about that. The special’s editing avoids any clear shots of audience members: no crowdwork, but also none of the garden-variety reaction shots of laughter. It’s even more pointed by the end. Rife’s big (and literal) mic drop is a chip-on-his-shoulder crack about how people thought he could only do crowdwork, a reference to the short-form crowdwork videos that have made him so huge. His hourlong crowdwork special, Walking Red Flag, released earlier this year, currently has nearly 10 million views on YouTube. See? that last line says. You guys don’t need to be part of this. I’m the comedian. I can stand on this stage and do it entirely myself.

Rife isn’t wrong. Stand-up that’s been carefully written and honed, with one person standing on a stage and holding a crowd’s attention through an entire long set, is a different skill set than crowdwork. It’s worth wanting to show that he has that ability. But Natural Selection is mostly about Rife’s desire to demonstrate that, and his resentment that even at this early stage of his career, he’s already in a place where he feels like he has to prove himself to an audience that he can’t even trust to be fun. But ultimately, he does need them. And however defensive he might be, however furious he might be at the specter of a random internet voice demanding his cancellation, his comedy still comes from a place of desperately hoping for their approval. As he fully admits, he can’t help himself. He wants to respond to every comment. He loves to engage.

In the final minutes, after Rife says that line about how he proudly hasn’t done any crowdwork, and he drops the mic and the credits roll, Natural Selection cuts back to a short post-credits scene. It’s Rife, in this same full theater, presumably right after he’s finished the hour. “Hope everybody enjoyed themselves,” he says. Then he starts to talk to the audience. “Did you know who I was when you came here?” he asks an older woman in the crowd. She nods. “They play TikTok on Hallmark?” he asks. The audience laughs, and the camera captures this woman giggling, tickled that Rife has acknowledged her. The crowdwork is back. Whatever Rife might want to prove with this special, he still can’t help turning back to the crowd, placating them, engaging with them. After closing with a speech about how artists just have to make their art, Rife turns back into the famous person who feels like he has to respond to everyone who leaves a comment on his post, lest they turn on him forever. No wonder he’s defensive.