40 People Showed Up for Taping of First Matt Rife Comedy Special

You got to hand it to Matt Rife. Only a few years ago, the Hawk Tuah Girl’s celebrity crush was self-funding YouTube specials. “People kept checking to see if I had an OnlyFans page, and I was getting Tweets all the time asking about it,” Rife recently humblebragged to Forbes. “That’s when the adult-themed platform exploded, and I thought that if I named the special Only Fans, it would be a number one Google.” (For the record, it appears Rife does have an OnlyFans page. His last post earned him more than $91 in tips.)

A GoFundMe campaign raised $30,000 for the 2021 special — “I think $15,000 or $20,000 was what I was really praying for” — and Rife was off to the races. “Despite only 40 people attending the taping,” Forbes reports, “Only Fans now boasts 13 million views on YouTube.” 

That’s the power of a number one Google, ladies and gentlemen.

And it’s also a crazy-fast rise to stardom, considering Rife’s 2023 Natural Selection special was one of Netflix’s most popular watches last year at more than 13.5 million hours. Natural Selection took off even as the social media haters gathered their pitchforks in protest. For the record, Rife still stands by his domestic violence jokes.

“I have a very dark sense of humor that’s not going to be for everybody,” he explained about the people he told to buy special-needs safety helmets to protect against future jokes. “But millions of people love that special, including the tens of thousands of people I ran that set by in preparation for that special. It helped me find an audience that’s going to be with me for a longer period of time.”

Rife does have regrets about Natural Selection, but again, it’s not about the battered woman he ridicules. “The only thing I regret from my last special was not putting in any crowd work,” Rife said about his very conscious decision not to do crowd work. “I didn’t want to do any of that because crowd work was what I’ve become known for, which is fantastic, but it can also pigeonhole you.”

With Natural Selection proving his comedy bona fides, Rife is diving right back into the pigeonhole with today’s Lucid special dropping on Netflix. This one is all crowd work, just to keep us guessing. “What I love about crowd work is it doesn’t burn anything,” he said — meaning every riff on someone’s weight is a potential one-of-a-kind TikTok that doesn’t give away scripted punchlines. “It’s new for every single show. It’s exciting for me. And I take great pride in that because so many comedians don’t switch up their set at all.”

Rife does have that ability to switch it up — he can tell a scripted joke about fear of gay ghosts eating his dick and improvise a joke about whether an audience member’s tits are real. And back in 2021, at least 40 people could say they saw it coming.