“Next time you see haters in my comments saying, ‘He doesn’t do anything but crowdwork, it’s so easy’ – is it?!‘ comedian Matt Rife asks his audience. The 28-year-old social media star has clearly retained the defensiveness that characterized so much of “Natural Selection,” his first Netflix hour from last fall, which is remembered primarily for an effectively stirring if groan-inducing segment on domestic violence. But in “Lucid,” his latest hour, Rife’s trademark stooges — mostly dick jokes and the aforementioned inferiority complex — break through his audience, a few hundred fans gathered at the Comedy Zone in Charlotte, North Carolina, to watch what is — Rife proudly and repeatedly points out — Netflix’s first audience-only special.
Rife isn’t the first stand-up comedian to fund an entire act off of spontaneous reactions from his paying audience. (A decade ago, Todd Barry ran an entire tour without any pre-written routines and combined the shows into a special directed by Lance Bangs.) It’s likely that the Phantom Haters who so irk Rife are reacting less to his tried-and-true method of connecting with audiences than to the impression that Rife is more influencer than observational, using TikTok as a shortcut to the upper echelons of his craft. With his full lips and chiseled jaw, Rife certainly looks the part.
To that end, Rife is keen to point out that he’s been performing at the Comedy Zone since he was a teenager, even if his mainstream success is relatively new. Whatever you think of his Gen-Z bro slapstick, “Lucid” — directed by Erik Griffin, with whom he frequently collaborates — shows Rife as a seasoned MC. He knows how long to think about an interesting answer without wringing it out (a woman who runs a business selling blowjob tutorials) and how to get out of an obvious dead end (an incoherent rambling about being single). Plus, including other points of view helps mitigate the exhaustion that comes with watching Rife pantomime a high-octane sex toy. He’s more palatable as a side dish than a main course.
“Lucid” isn’t as spontaneous in practice as its premise suggests. Although Rife opens with an expected outfit-based innuendo—a gentleman wearing a ridiculous pair of glittery scalloped-toe boots is “dressed like Santa’s favorite elf”—the bulk of the hour is a guided conversation on the subject of dreams. The first half is about dreams in the sense of aspirations: a woman who gave up her career in marketing to become a pilot; a gay man who knows what his stripper name would be if he were a woman. (Brandy Jameson. Pretty good!) The second, weaker half is about more literal dreams. Rife has a recurring nightmare in which his teeth fall out; a viewer is constantly stalked by a faceless witch.
Although he’s a competent moderator, Rife never generates the electricity of true, transcendent spontaneity. The framework itself is pretty hackneyed. Rife introduces his subject by admitting that he’s lucky to be living his own dream, and so wants to learn more about other people’s dreams too – but by the end it’s become a setup for more childish sex stories. (Naturally, the nightmare chat is followed by a poll on wet dreams.)
In recent years, Netflix has made the same shift with comedy and scripted content, shifting the focus from prestige, or at least variety, to purely populist pieces. (Critics are certainly no longer the target audience; no advance copies of “Lucid” were provided for review.) The former home of Maria Bamford’s madcap, genius “Lady Dynamite” now works with the likes of Rife, Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis: outspoken men who are sometimes controversial in an exhausting, culture-war-like way but mostly offer effortless laughs. “Lucid” is just the latest phase of a broader game plan.
“Matt Rife: Lucid” is now streaming on Netflix.
