For Matt Rife, Being a Hot Comic Isn’t All Laughs (2024)

Let’s play a game: Does the name Matt Rife ring a bell? If not, you’re probably not Gen Z (or maybe you’re just not online very much). This was made uncomfortably clear to me when I asked a gaggle of young colleagues if they’d heard of the 28-year-old comic, and they erupted into swoony gasps. “Yes!” they chanted at once, “He’s so hot.”

The extraordinary rise of Matt Rife began in the summer of 2021, when the then struggling stand-up, a native of Ohio, posted a video in which he roasted an audience member who broke up with her boyfriend, an emergency room worker, because he “didn’t do anything.” His response: “Oh, I’m sorry—you broke up with a hero?” Whoops of laughter ensued, the video went viral, and a TikTok comedian was born.

Over the next several months, he continued to post these crowd-focused videos, charming clips in which he chats with the audience about their tattoos, red flags, and biggest fears. He has a tendency to go deep, asking probing questions—the kind you wouldn’t expect from a comedy show—like if anyone in the crowd has family members with autism. (Rife somehow navigates this tricky territory with aplomb.)

But in some of his most memorable bits, he is responding to his audience’s outrageous advances. In one clip, a woman propositions him mid-set with a lewd tee (“I came to Iowa and all I got was this T-shirt and a blowj*b”) and homemade cookies. “Listen guys, I’ve never ended a show early before,” Rife says with flushed cheeks before asking the fan for her name.

“Christina,” he repeats, biting into a cookie, “you are so hot.”

After watching his oeuvre on TikTok, as well as his two YouTube specials, it’s not hard to understand why Rife—with his easy charm, quick zingers, and boy-band pretty face—got so popular so quickly. (He honestly looks like an AI-generated teen idol; a cut-out of his visage belongs in a locker somewhere.)

Rife has often spoken about the conundrum of being a good looking comic—in his first special, on the Today show, and last week over a plate of spaghetti Bolognese in Lower Manhattan with me. “Whenever it comes to my looks, what am I supposed to say? If I talk about it, I’m conceited, right?” Rife says, twirling his pasta. “Me, personally? I don’t feel like I’m a good-looking person, and nobody ever believes that. I have so many insecurities about my physicality, it is insane.”

Rife was in town to promote his first Netflix special, Natural Selection (out today), before setting off on his entirely sold-out ProbleMATTic World Tour. The Matt Rife frenzy certainly translates to the real world; the sheer volume of ticket sales for his tour’s pre-sale crashed Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift–style.

We sat down last week to chew over the pros and cons of being a heartthrob, industry double standards, and the responsibility of having a totally bananas fan base.

Vogue: Your first Netflix special is about to come out, you were on Fallon last night, you’re doing back-to-back magazine shoots, and you’re about to go on your sold-out worldwide tour. How are you feeling at this moment?

Matt Rife: Well, to be completely candid, it’s wildly overwhelming. You know, for 10 years, I woke up every day with absolutely nothing to do—nothing. Until, finally, I kicked my ass into being like, Okay, you’ve got to create your own work if you’re going to sustain yourself. So all this happening right now…it’s a lot, but oftentimes I find myself not getting to enjoy the moment as much as I should. Like, last night I was on Jimmy Fallon—Jimmy Fallon! And I was so tired that, when it was done, I was like, I gotta go to bed, rather than, like, calling my mom and all my friends…If I could sleep like a normal human being, I think this would be a lot easier.

You’ve gone viral for your crowd work, but there’s none of that in your new special. Tell me about the thought process there.

I’m just excited to reach a broader audience with this. At this point, on YouTube and social media, I feel like I’m just creating things for the people that already follow me, which is wildly important. But also, social media success it’s respected because everybody’s on social media. People view people who get successful on social media as just lucky, like, you happened to get chosen out of all of us.

When somebody lands something on Netflix, it’s a bit of a more verified platform. So I’m hoping they’ll watch it and be like, Okay, he does do more than crowd work, and maybe I want to go see a live show now. Because if you come to my show, I do an hour of material and then maybe like 5 to 10 minutes of crowd work—maybe.

Will you continue to do crowd work while you’re on tour?

Probably, because it’s fun for me. I will not do it when people expect it, though—when they demand it. I’ve messaged people who were like, “I bought tickets to Matt Rife’s show; if he doesn’t do crowd work, or roast me, I want my money back.” I’ll respond: “Then do not come. Do not expect that.” I don’t even know where you’re seated—what if you’re in the balcony? I probably can’t talk to you up there. And if I do it means you yelled out and interrupted the show, which is wildly inappropriate.

There is a lot of inappropriate behavior at your shows, though. Why do you feel like your fans go so crazy?

I think it’s because so much of my audience is new to comedy. I’m their introduction to a comedy show, so they don’t know how to appropriately react. They look at it more like a concert than they do like a play. With a play, you sit and you watch a story unfold, which is really what stand-up is—versus concerts, which are all about energy, right? Like you want the musician to know you f*cking love what they’re doing. You love this song. You love that they hit that note right there….

And they’re playing the hits.

And they’re playing the hits, exactly! Play the one I want to hear—[in my case], crowd work. I think that’s usually the instinct they have going into these shows, not realizing that that’s not what it’s supposed to be. So it’s a bit of a responsibility, bringing in a new audience to comedy, but I’m also incredibly lucky that I get to tap into a whole fan base that a lot of comics can’t reach.

A lot of your audience goes wild, specifically, for you—one woman propositioned you during your set, for instance. Does it ever make you uncomfortable?

Every single time—’cause, like, I just want to do jokes. I just want to go on stage, tell jokes, maybe talk to a person or two, see if anything funny happens. And that’s it. It’s uncomfortable because there are a lot of double standards—like, I’ve had my nipple bit at a meet and greet before. Could you imagine if a female comic was getting treated like this by guys? It would never fly, right? But of course, there’s zero empathy or sympathy for a guy because I’m not in physical danger. So it’s a bit strange—flattering that they care that much, but it’s a bit strange.

You claim to have had a relatively recent glow-up; how do you feel about your heartthrob status now?

It’s got its pros and cons, I suppose. The pros being you get such a massively passionate fan base, but the flip side of that is people take you less seriously as a comic. So it’s a weird thing that you have to personally choose how you want to balance that.

If people think I’m a heartthrob, cool; as long as you respect my comedy and like to laugh, you can think whatever you want about me, I don’t care. [But] I think it creates a lot more hate than it does positive effects. Besides getting my teeth done, I’ve never done anything to enhance my looks—[that and] going to the gym, which I do for more than just aesthetic reasons. So if anyone has a problem with that, that’s their problem. I’m not, like, doing anything.

You don’t even get a lot of sleep!

No, I don’t sleep, dude. I’m a zombie. [Laughs.] I’m trying so hard to be as ugly as possible, I f*cking promise you.

It’s one of those things that, at a certain point, I’m gonna stop talking about it, because I know I’m more than that. And the more people only look at me for, like, that one aspect of myself, the less they care about my comedy and my entertainment and things I want to create. So it’s like, yeah, we can reference these things now, but eventually, I’m going to be like, Can we just focus on the work?

You’ve said you dislike social media, where I imagine you encounter a lot of these comments. How are you handling internet trolls as your fame grows?

It’s something I need to work on; I’m so immature. I have such a hard time not replying back. We live in a world where everyone has such a false sense of security and confidence hiding behind a computer screen. I have a huge problem with people not having to pay some kind of physical consequence. And obviously, because you’re on a computer screen, I can’t slap the sh*t out of you, but I can at least check you sometimes. I can roast you right back. I just can’t let them get away with it—it drives me absolutely insane.

In your special, you take aim at a lot of “girly” tropes—astrology, crystals, etc. Is your girlfriend into any of that?

No, no. She’s not into crystals or astrology or anything like that—thank God. That would have been the biggest red flag.

Are people in your life wary of ending up in your act now?

I don’t talk about too much stuff too close to home. I’ve always been that way. Like, sometimes I’m so close to things I don’t find them funny at all. Like when I talk about my upbringing and where I’m from and all that kind of stuff, people are so fascinated, and it’s not funny at all to me.

But what about your grandpa fleshlight story?

Oh, another story I didn’t think was funny. I mentioned it on my friend Adam Ray’s podcast. I just brought it up conversationally, and he was like, “You got to talk about that.”

And your grandfather saw the bit?

He was lucky enough to see that before he passed away. Not in the actual special—he passed away two weeks before—but he was able to see me working on it when I was first starting to write it. He loved it; he was so embarrassed, but he loved it.

You tend to ask audience members what their biggest fear is. What’s your biggest fear?

Well, the joke answer is spiders. I f*cking hate spiders—spiders and heights. I’m not good with either one of them. Deep answer: job security. That probably gives me the most anxiety about what’s happening right now. It’s like, yeah, obviously this is incredible and I’m trying to soak it all in and enjoy it, and it’s still an incredible accomplishment to even get this far, but this is such a fickle business. Plenty of people haven’t had an amazing one year of their career. And then, as we know, people’s attention spans are short and people can forget about you. You have to capitalize on the next opportunity.

This interview has been edited and condensed.