Matt Rife’s New Special Barely Goes Beyond Asking the Audience About Their Jobs
In Matt Rife’s new crowd work special Lucid, TikTok’s most successful stand-up loosely structures the show around the topic of dreams — any dreams at all, whether they’re aspirational, recurring or wet.
At the end of his controversial 2023 Netflix special Natural Selection, social media sensation Rife closed the show with a literal mic drop as he mean-mugged to the roaring crowd and asked them “What do I know? I only do crowd work, right?” before spiking the handheld microphone and strutting offstage. In Lucid, which hit streaming this morning, Rife sports a Ted Talk-style face mic as he dances around the seeming contradiction between his past apprehension toward the label of “crowd work comedian” and his new show’s 54 straight minutes of audience interaction, making it the first crowd-work-only special in Netflix history.
Early in Lucid, Rife briefly addressed his complicated relationship with crowd work, claiming that, at maximum, there are only 10 minutes of crowd work in every 60-minute set he performs — well, except in Lucid, of course, wherein Rife seeks to elevate the art of crowd work to new conceptual heights by using the vaguely philosophical theme of “dreams” to tie together his interactions with the audience members on whose eccentricities the show desperately depends.
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At an intimate comedy club in Charlotte, North Carolina where Rife began his comedy career at the age of 16, Rife told his loyal local audience that he wanted to focus his crowd work show around the idea of dreams because they, his fans, made all of his dreams come true when they propelled him to the top of the stand-up industry at a young age. As for the audience’s dreams — well, is asking a crowd member “Are you working at your dream job?” really much more than a needlessly lofty way of saying, “So what do you do for work?”
Rife's first major mark in Lucid is a money shot — shortly after explaining the “premise” of Lucid to the already warm crowd, Rife starts talking to a young woman who works as the manager of her mother's company. To Rife’s good fortune, that small business is a blow-job training operation, and the audience member’s mother films instructional videos that teach women how to give their men great head. The mouthy mom is there to answer any and all of Rife’s questions about her profession, though a good chunk of the conversation revolves around Rife repetitively ribbing the teacher as he insists that her fellatio skills couldn’t be that good — oh, your husband left you? Guess you’re not that good at giving blow jobs. The training video is 17 minutes long? That’s too long for a blow job, you must be bad at them.
The oral sex organization swallows up a solid 10 minutes of Rife’s runtime before he moves on to another mother-daughter duo. Despite Rife’s best efforts to alienate his mostly female following with all his domestic violence jokes and Jordan Peterson partnerships, Rife’s most rabid fans still seem to be straight women, aged 18 to 49. The next two targets are a special education teacher and her behavioral therapist daughter, jobs that Rife makes a point to praise as selfless and important while somehow failing to grasp the simplest of truths about the professions, or day jobs in general. When the teacher tells Rife that she pursued a career in public service partially for the health insurance, Rife responds with all the predictable incredulity of a comedian who has never had to learn what COBRA means, shouting, “Wait, wait, wait — you doin’ it for the perks?!?!”
This is a throughline in Lucid, the first half of which is exclusively composed of Rife asking people what they do for a living — Rife simply doesn’t understand most jobs or most people, nor is he able to elegantly and consistently connect his audience’s anecdotes back to the overarching theme. At one point, Rife interviews a stay-at-home dad and his wife, and, when Rife asks the woman what she does for work, she tells him that she’s in “interventional radiology.” Rife’s follow-up questions focus more on word-association bits about terms like “intervention” and “catheter” rather than learning anything about the medical professional herself, let alone her “dreams,” and he ends the conversation with the affirmation, “Nurses are some of my favorite people in the world. Love ‘em.” The woman in question never mentioned nursing, at least in the cut that made it to streaming.
During the latter half of Lucid, Rife takes the show’s theme much more literally, asking his audience about any recurring dreams they’ve had, including haunting nightmares. But even in this more straight-forward second act, Rife struggles to delve deeper into his chosen topic as he derails what could be compelling stories from his audience to do even more blow-job bits. At one point, a woman in the audience tells Rife that, twice a week, ever since she was 12 years old, she has had the exact same nightmare and faced the same choice. In the dream, the audience member is running through a forest away from a faceless witch when she comes upon a cliff’s edge. She then has to choose whether to confront her pursuer or jump, possibly to her death. “I always jump!” she admits of her dilemma.
In response, Rife tells a ghost story from his childhood, in which he claims to have been visited by a dead woman draped in black with no face, save for a gaping open mouth. “It had to have been like a sleep paralysis, because I could not get my boxers down fast enough,” Rife cracks of his supernatural visitor, adding for anyone who couldn’t catch his hidden meaning, “She was basically asking for it, if you know what I mean!” Rife recalls how he continued on with his day after the haunting experience, though, later, “I got on a Ouija board that night and was like, ‘You up?’”
Inevitably, Rife then segues the set toward the subject of wet dreams, a titillating topic that kept his audience giggling for the final 10 minutes of Lucid. After interrogating the sexual hang-ups and shameful fantasies of a few eager audience members, Rife once again attempts to connect the special to his original thesis in a closing statement, telling the crowd, “I wanted to do this show about dreams because every single person in this room made my dream come true, and if there’s anything I can ever do to encourage you guys to pursue your dreams, I hope every single one of them comes true, man.”
It’s clear that Rife truly believes in his ability to make crowd work more meaningful and empathetic than anything that has ever been performed on a platform like Netflix. And his gratitude for the paying patrons whose jobs, dreams and jizz took center stage in Lucid seems genuine. Ultimately, though, Rife failed to deliver on his ambitious artistic vision because he couldn’t help but fall back on the same material that made him TikTok’s #1 crowd work comic in the first place.
But, hey, who am I to say that he didn’t deliver on his promise to his audience. Maybe that stay-at-home dad always dreamed of telling Matt Rife that he used to be a truck driver.
