Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Matt Rife: Natural Selection’ On Netflix, This Year’s Hottest Comic Comes Of Age?

No comedian has racked up more views in 2023 than Matt Rife. On TikTok (where he has more than 18 million followers) and Instagram (where he has another 6 million plus) his crowd-work clips dominate the algorithm so much that YouTube is flooded with bootleg compilations of him, too. On Rife’s own YouTube channel, he already has released not one, not two, but three stand-up specials already, garnering a total of 38 million views combined. So of course he’s got a Netflix special? But what’s left in his tank to share now?

MATT RIFE: NATURAL SELECTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: For his debut Netflix special, Matt Rife filmed at his tour stop at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., where he joked about his fame and social media, his love for old people, his first found porn, and how he still believes in ghosts and monsters.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: More than anything or anyone else, Rife seems like a second coming of Dane Cook, a youthful exuberance and slight puckishness combined with a mastery of the evolving technological shifts in social media, all in a package designed to appeal to young and predominantly female audiences.

Memorable Jokes: One of Rife’s first bits makes fun of how different Baltimore is from the rest of Maryland, a state he says is “so beautiful and so ratchet for no reason,” exemplified by the women with a black eye who seated him for a meal in Baltimore. “This is the face of the company?” he jokes. “If she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.” Laugh or groan, but either way, Rife steps his toe out in front of the stage, claiming he just wanted symbolically to check the temperature of the crowd. Could they handle a domestic violence joke?

Rife makes fun of women who make crystals or astrology their whole personality. He claims to loathe young people, especially relative to the elderly. He thanks God for blessing his autistic nephew with an aptitude for painting, only to pivot to a joke about a high-school classmate of his who has “Dick-You-Down syndrome.” He wants his audience to know he won’t eat onions but will eat ass; and plenty of other bits lead back to reminders of Rife’s own sexual preferences or pecadilloes. Perhaps we should blame his stepfather for leaving that beer box full of porn on VHS tapes for a pubescent Rife to find in the closet.

Our Take: Coming of age, indeed.

It’s fascinating, then, that Rife claims people didn’t believe in him as a comedian for 12 years, because the clips and IMDB credits speak to multiple opportunities along the way for him to break out in a big way before TikTok turned the trick. Like some other comedic young guns including Pete Davidson or D.C. Young Fly, Rife performed on MTV’s Wild ‘N Out (which also helps explain Rife’s current stage presence and delivery methods). He also appeared on an episode each of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Fresh Off The Boat, and in 2019 he competed in primetime on NBC’s Bring The Funny where celebrity judge Chrissy Teigen cooed over him.

Some critics believe pretty boy comics have no material. That’s not the case with Rife, who knows how to craft a joke and a routine complete with callbacks and all the usual stand-up tricks. And yet, ’twas TikTok that punched his ticket to viral fame.

Rife claims in this hour that it’s not what he wanted necessarily. “I can’t stand social media, which I know is crazy for y’all to hear ’cause it’s why you’re all here,” he says, calling online forums negative, toxic and “full of horrible people saying horrible things all the time.”

Not that that has stopped him from both engaging as an online contributor and reactor. One long story about Rife’s experience on a flight becomes a life lesson for him as his Twitter rant about the flight inspires hundreds of complaints…about him. It’s a ridiculously trivial argument to begin with for Rife and the flight attendant, let alone turn into full stand-up routine, but it’s also the inspiration for him titling this hour “Natural Selection.” Besides, his defensiveness prompting his desire to metaphorically kill anyone who comes for him isn’t merely a character trait or a defect, but also the very thing that thrust his social media into the spotlight. Millions upon millions discovered Rife’s TikToks and Reels by virtue of him putting down hecklers or reacting to his stand-up audiences.

In the end, Rife wants us to believe that we shouldn’t listen to any haters online. “You can create and share whatever you want,” he says. “It what’s feels right to me, and I’m just doing what I think is funny.” Even if for himself, he still feels the need to win, to get in the last word with a mic drop: “But what do I know? I only do crowd work, right?”

Our Call: If looks could kill, am I right, ladies? Seriously, though, whether you want to watch Rife because you’re already a fan of his clips, because you think he’s hot, or you just want to know why he’s the hot topic of comedy debates these days, you should STREAM IT just so you know what all the fuss is about. You can draw your own conclusions.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.