Matt Rife Closes His New Netflix Special With A Wink at All Those Plastic Surgery Rumors
Last time Matt Rife recorded a special for Netflix, he ended 2023’s Natural Selection by asking his audience, “What do I know? I only do crowd work, right?” before literally dropping the mic and flexing his way into the wings. This time around, he wants us to know that he heard us talking shit about his teeth.
When Natural Selection hit streaming back in November, the TikTok-beloved stand-up’s debut Netflix special drew controversy for a domestic violence joke that many critics and comedy fans thought was distasteful toward his mostly female audience. Rife, who seemed to be hyper-aware that his audiences were consistently filled with straight women of all ages and varying degrees of expressive thirst for his chiseled physique, his piercing blue eyes and his “impossibly” sculpted features, quickly fell under extreme scrutiny from some extremely online former fans who criticized his act, his attitude and even his famous jawline.
At the height of the non-cancellation that temporarily awarded Rife with the dubious distinction of being the “Main Character of TikTok,” many plastic surgeon influencers (a real category of content creators that actually, unfortunately, exists) came to the “scientific” conclusion that Rife’s beloved bone structure wasn’t carved by the Gods, but by surgeons. One TikToker even indirectly claimed to be the doctor responsible for the mandible.
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Well, at the end of Rife’s crowd-work-only Netflix special Lucid, released earlier today, Rife slyly nodded his supposedly artificial skull at the rumors surrounding his appearance, ending the act with a black-and-white freeze-frame bearing the epilogue text, “Matt went backstage and took out his teeth and obviously fake jawline.”
Back when the backlash to Natural Selection dominated discussion on TikTok, pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories and baseless surgery speculation propelled new posts about Rife’s appearance to seven-figure view counts on a daily basis. However, beneath the droning buzz of plastic surgery influencers and cosmetic investigators claiming to have definitive proof of Rife’s surgery history, there did sit one small grain of truth: Rife had veneers put in to fix his smile shortly before his meteoric rise.
To be clear, that’s not an assumption based on a viral video from some self-described dental implant expert. Rife posted about the procedure on his Instagram back in 2018 to thank the dentist responsible for fixing his “FUCKED” teeth and for giving him newfound confidence in his appearance. For all the many criticisms of Rife and his public persona that swarmed around social media at the end of 2023, the dumbest by far was the fixation on his face and the non-secret origin story of the smile that won him so many hearts.
The punchline at the end of Lucid leans into the stupidity of Rife’s least coherent controversy, and it shows a self-awareness that many of Rife’s critics likely didn’t know existed. It also provided the biggest laugh of the night that didn’t come from one of his audience members admitting that she manages her mom's blow-job training company.
