Matt Rife: Lucid - A Crowd Work Special

Crowd work is improv. Improv is scary and hard. Matt is brilliant at it...seriously, and looks so comfortable in front of a crowd, who is always judging you, and he is able to completely hold court. You have to be whip smart and have a varied diet of history, current events, politics, general gossip, etc, and Matt has all that at a young age.

I just don't get that some people hate him...he's so personable and funny. I know he's be accused of punching down at women in his routines but there is none of that here. It's super fun to watch him play off the crowd and seems to even be overly respectable to everyone involved.

Compared to what I've seen on Tik-Tok, this crowd work special wasn't good. Many of the "jokes" weren't laughable and members of the audience seemed like they were falling asleep.

I mean, I like him as a comedian, but this special wasn't for me. Plus, wearing his own merch seemed weird to me. It seems like he's trying to hard to be liked. I'm not sure what his full show is like, but just going off of this, it seems pretty lackluster. Dry humor sometimes doesn't work for people.

My rating this a 2/5 stars is because I couldn't even make it 15 minutes into it. Plus, all of the cursing! Too much of the F-Bomb.

I went into this today ready to laugh as I usually do when watching his crowd work on the internet short videos. Of course, sometimes he makes me uncomfortable and sometimes really uncomfortable. Still, I wanted to watch and laugh. And I did a few times. And I was really uncomfortable a few times. But mainly, I was ready for it to be over because I found it very limiting. The idea of dreams as the focal point of his entire show just stifled anything that went beyond that box he put his show in. It went beyond a few times, yes. But I really think I would have enjoyed a pure stand up routine instead of all crowd work. He's funny and personable, but this time it just didn't completely work for me.

Matt Rife has has quite the wild ride when it comes to fame. Thanks to tik tok and other forms of social media he shot into the stratosphere because of his crowd work. His shows became the hottest tickets in town as he filled out arenas across the country. But he let it go to his head, let his foot off the gas, made some character canceling mistakes, and quickly became one of the most hated comedians out there after a Netflix special that didn't land. I will admit that I was one of those people that was done with him after all of that, but I have to say that I admire his effort in trying to make a comeback. He does it by going back to his crowd work roots and launching something that is somewhat revolutionary to try to move his craft forward and salvage is career. While I had to admit I would watch another one if it came out, I also thought it fell a little flat. The crowd was too excited to get their wild stories out there which detracted from it, but there were some funny parts. My rating is really a 5 with an extra point for originality.

I will admit I only lasted about 15 minutes. The first bit with the mother-daughter seemed totally staged. It had to have been staged and that just seems like cheating and a gimmick. I really like him in his short videos and he does sell out. Tried to get tickets to see him while he was in Maine. They even had to add a couple of shows because they sold out so quickly. But maybe he sticks to his own material and doesn't do crowd work. There's no way you can convince me that that mother and daughter were not planted there. This just absolutely no way it's believable so for that reason I turned it off and came here to leave a review.