Matt Rife Hates Social Media: ‘TikTok Is Not for Me’

Dana Carvey and David Spade were fascinated by Matt Rife’s rise to social media fame on this week’s Fly on the Wall podcast. But Rife surprised his hosts by biting the hand that fed his comedy stardom: “I fucking hate social media.” 

“TikTok and social media is so my generation,” Rife said. “But it is not for me.” Instead, Rife dreamed of the comedy career arc of the Spade generation: Work the clubs, develop a tight five minutes, get a spot on Johnny Carson, land a pilot, do a sitcom, then it’s off to the movies. “That's what I always dreamed of doing,” he explained. “That's how I wanted my stand-up career to go.”  

Instead, Rife was subjected to a world in which he had to create crowdwork videos to make his way. “If I didn’t have to be on (social media), I wouldn’t have one,” Rife insisted. But how could he go against the grain when comics like Andrew Schulz, Sam Morril and others gained TikTok traction? He had no choice but to “buy a camera with money I don’t have.” 

His first few videos did “pretty fucking good,” but things really got crazy when he did a show in Arizona. He was working on a bit about relationship red flags from the male point-of-view. Realizing that was one-sided, he went into the audience to ask women about their own relationship warning signs. One woman’s complaint? Her man doesn’t do anything. Rife was confused. The guy didn’t have a job? No, he worked in the ER — the problem was that made him too tired to do much socializing after work.

“He was a fucking hero,” said Rife. “Forgive Superman for not wanting to go to the farmer’s market with you after he gets done saving the world.”

That one interaction made it all happen for Rife. “I just got to destroy her for like four or five minutes, and that clip took off and did like 10 million views overnight,” he remembered. “And then that made every other video on my page do like a million views.”

The comic explained how those TikTok watches turbo-boosted his self-made YouTube specials, which, in turn, made ticket sales for his live shows go through the roof. “I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna sell out comedy clubs. And we did for like six months straight every single weekend, Thursday through Sunday. It was a dream come true.”

So here’s a dumb question: Why exactly does Rife hate social media? In his excitement about describing his rise to fame, he never really got back to that topic — except to complain about the reaction to last year’s special, Natural Selection. “There was some controversy around the beginning of the special, which was total bullshit by the way,” Rife maintained. (Quick refresher: The total bullshit was Rife’s jokes about domestic violence.) “I learned we live in a society where it’s cool to hate something. Like we latch onto one thing in a certain moment a couple of times a year. And I got to be that thing that people went, ‘Aha, this is awful. He’s a piece of shit. This isn’t funny. He's the worst person in the world.’”

Rife doesn’t mention that he used social media to tell offended viewers to purchase special-needs safety helmets, virtual gasoline that kept his name flaming in the headlines much longer than if he’d ignored the criticism. Not coincidentally, it also kept Natural Selection in the Netflix Top 10 for weeks.

Without online haters as rocket fuel, that’s an accomplishment his latest special Lucid has failed to duplicate.