“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. “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. Gary Gulman lays it out in the opening minutes of his new Max special, Born on 3rd Base. I just started this big chain reaction and now pretty much everything I post does between like 3 to 40 million views. 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 did, and that video changed everything. “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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. Miller, compilations from various shows by Morril and Mark Normand, plus at least a dozen others. Even Joe Pera got in on the action.Ī 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. Joe List made a running joke of hoping to generate clips in his latest YouTube special. Sam Morril included captioning and reaction shots for the crowd-work portions of his Netflix special. 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. 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.Īh, yes, TikTok, where-more often than not-comedy went to die in 2023. He re-released that hour-plus on his YouTube channel in April, where it has recorded more than 18 million views. 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. 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 ended the year by publicly telling a 6-year-old that Santa Claus isn’t real. 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.
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