Very few people knew who stand-up comic Matt Rife was before July 30, 2022.
To get some traction, Rife was posting clips on TikTok of him cracking wise with audience members at comedy clubs. It’s what is known in the industry as “crowd work.” A clip Rife posted July 30 featured him joking with a woman who said she’d broken up with a man who worked in an emergency room because he didn’t do anything outside of work. Rife’s off-the-cuff response: “He was saving lives!” Then he asked her: “What do you do?”
The clip, dubbed “Lazy Hero,” went viral and garnered 20 million viewers within days, causing related clips of Rife to get millions of views in an algorithm-friendly deluge. He soon had millions of followers. Within months, his growing popularity landed him a special with Netflix called “Natural Selection” that debuted in November.
“One clip just blew up everything,” Rife told podcaster Adam Ray earlier this year. “A video I thought was stupid and didn’t want to post anyways. I’m like, this isn’t even funny.”
Rife, 28, who was not available for interview, is now on a sold-out tour that goes into next year and includes stops in Australia, Europe and Canada. He sold 725,000 tickets before the Netflix special had even come out.
“This kid has more drive and determination of anybody I’ve met in my life” said Gary Abdo, owner of Atlanta Comedy Theatres in Norcross and downtown Atlanta, who managed Rife in his early years as a teenager. “He was never not going to blow up.”
Credit: CONTRIBUTED/GARY ABDO
Credit: CONTRIBUTED/GARY ABDO
Rife’s seemingly overnight success is just one example of social media’s ever-growing influence on stand-up comedy.
Other comics who have also leveraged TikTok and other social media outlets include Atlantans John Crist and Heather McMahan, and New York’s Nimesh Patel.
Meanwhile, more established comics who spurn social media are finding it tougher to sell tickets. Billy Gardell, a veteran stand-up who has starred in two hit CBS shows (”Mike & Molly” and “Bob Hearts Abishola”) but isn’t active on TikTok or Instagram, recently appeared at the Punchline Comedy Club in Buckhead but had trouble filling seats.
“I told some of the comics who were scoffing at social media a few years ago that it’s a meteorite that is about to wipe you out,” said Abdo. “If you’re not carrying a million people on social media, if you can’t get people on their phones, they’re not buying a ticket to your show.”
The world is far different from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ’90s, when breaking it big in stand-up comedy meant getting on TV, preferably Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” or “Late Night With David Letterman.” A sitcom was the mother lode. Just ask Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Roseanne Barr or Tim Allen.
For smaller comics, the best way to sell tickets was getting on radio station morning shows in the city they were performing and yukking it up with the hosts at 7:30 a.m. in the morning.
Abdo, who used to own Atlanta’s Uptown Comedy Corner, remembered taking an unknown comic named Steve Harvey to V-103 and other radio stations in the early 1990s. “There was no online ticketing,” he said. “But after he did radio, there was a huge line to buy tickets. He set the precedent on how to use radio.” (Harvey now has his own syndicated radio show heard locally on Majic 107.5/97.5.)
The internet changed the equation, though, early on. First it was a means to get email addresses from ticket buyers and send them email blasts the next time the comic was in town. When the first popular social networking site MySpace arrived in 2003, Dane Cook quickly took advantage with observational humor that appealed to the younger male demo who were early adopters. He collected more than a million MySpace fans, nabbed an HBO special in 2005 and sold out arenas nationwide for several years.
“He put a lot of time and energy into it,” said Marshall Chiles, owner of the Laughing Skull Lounge in Midtown. “He was the first comedian visionary with social media.”
YouTube, which debuted in 2005, was another great avenue for some stand-up comics. In 2007, Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham posted a bit he did with his puppet Achmed the Dead Terrorist, the skeletal corpse of an incompetent suicide bomber, and drew 100 million viewers. The buzz helped him graduate from theaters to arenas. He has headlined Philips Arena and its renovated successor State Farm Arena numerous times over the past 14 years.
Then came Twitter in 2006, which provided comics a home to test out jokes at 140 characters or less. It also became a free and easy place to promote shows. Early converts included Hannibal Buress, Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt, Jim Gaffigan and Amy Schumer.
Credit: Nora Canfield
Credit: Nora Canfield
The shift wasn’t immediate. John Crist, a 39-year-old Christian observational comic who grew up in Lilburn and now resides in Nashville, recalled being told by an old-school Hollywood agent a decade ago that the only way for him to break it big was to move to Los Angeles and get a sitcom deal so he could sell 2,500 tickets in Omaha, Nebraska.
“I was thinking, ‘A sitcom? What year is this?’” he said. Crist followed that advice to no avail.
“I remember being told to stay off the road in January and February for TV pilot season in hopes to get an audition,” Crist said. “This was crazy so I started blazing my own path.”
In recent years, Crist began posting hour-long specials for free on YouTube, generating millions of views and fueling ticket sales. “If there’s any barrier between you and the content, they won’t go there,” he said.
He also posted sketches on social media between snippets of stand-up for his now 2.1 million TikTok followers.
“Honest football coach. Every parent at Disney World. Sponsor a millennial,” Crist said, describing the names of some of his more popular sketches. “All these goofy sketches that people shared widely. Once you get them to watch one video, they’re hooked into your sphere.”
He is now able to sell thousands of tickets per city, including two stops this past fall at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, which has a capacity of 4,665 seats.
Credit: NBC
Credit: NBC
TikTok has become an especially useful place to showcase stand-up comedy in short bursts, replete with captions and punchy titles. DC Young Fly (3.1 million followers), Desi Banks (2.2 million) and Leanne Morgan (547,000) are a sampling of Southern comics who have used the video service to their advantage.
Chris DiPetta, who co-owns the Punchline Comedy Club, said the club books “more TikTok acts than ever before.” The only downside, he said, is hardcore fans only come for particular acts. They don’t show up to comedy clubs just to see whoever is there like they used to do, he said.
Nimesh Patel, a New York-based 37-year-old Indian American comic with a sardonic, deadpan onstage style, has collected 1.3 million followers on TikTok, which became a common outlet for stand-up comics during the pandemic when they were forced off the stage and onto video screens.
When his wife first told him about TikTok in June 2020, Patel said he half-heartedly put out a single video doing a three-second parody of a Kanye West song. But he wasn’t sold on it.
A few months later, a friend told him TikTok was getting hot so he took that advice seriously. He began posting daily clips of his stand-up in brief, edited chunks. At the time, he was one of the early adopters in the stand-up world. One set of jokes hit 800,000 views: “I started feeding the machine,” he said.
In 2021, he was setting up make-up dates from before the pandemic and decided to promote the shows on TikTok. “I had these shows in Houston that were supposed to be one night for 70 people become four shows with 200 people each in a matter of two or three weeks,” Patel said. “That’s crazy!”
Patel said his crowds have also gotten more diverse, courtesy of social media.
“I have a 20-year-old Indian kid who goes to Georgia Tech next to a 70-year-old white guy who saw me from clips on TikTok. That was eye-opening to me,” he said. “I could speak to a lot of different people.”
Instagram has been especially fruitful for female stand-up comics. Atlanta’s Heather McMahan built her career around a mostly female millennial fan base, with 800,000 followers on Instagram. She has spent years expressing her love for Old Navy, White Claw and Britney Spears. In videos, she makes fun of herself while taking trips to Trader Joe’s or opining about PMS.
“It’s the wild power of the internet,” said McMahan, 36. “When I started doing comedy in basement bars in New York and Los Angeles, putting things on the internet opened up a whole new world of fans and people to engage in my material.”
She said her broad humor translates well on Instagram: “I speak my point of view. The stories start with me. I walk through my day-to-day craziness. It’s very relatable. I’m very transparent ... It’s cool to see so many women come to the show and feel they’re represented. I give them escape to giggle about life.”
While social media is a great promotional tool, so are podcasts. Some comics like Marc Maron and Joe Rogan now make more money off podcasting than stand-up. But others use podcasts to stay creative and connected with their fans between tour dates.
Since 2019, McMahan has hosted the weekly podcast “Absolutely Not,” where she unpacks her life and takes calls from her dedicated listeners. When fans yell the phrase “tiramisu bitch,” she said she knows they are dedicated podcast listeners.
Her popularity landed her a Netflix special this past fall and she recorded a second one last month at the Fox Theatre.
Rapid success courtesy of social media doesn’t guarantee long-term success. Cook is now barely an afterthought since he did arena dates in the late 2000s. And there is always potential for backlash.
Rife’s Netflix special created a sizable uproar on social media due to a joke he made about domestic violence. And many fans who knew his TikTok work were less impressed with his stand-up routine. The special received a 17% Rotten Tomatoes positive rating from the audience. A Vulture critic called his on-stage work “regressive schtick.”
Rife told podcaster Jordan Peterson last week that while he’s “still growing and learning,” he’ll “never apologize for a joke ever. I just find the prioritization of human beings so (expletive). How insane is it to sit behind your phone or computer to complain about something you don’t like. What an absolute waste of energy and time.”
DiPetta sees a bright future for Rife: “Matt is still working on his voice. I think he’ll be doing movies soon. He’s a good-looking kid, which never hurts. I believe he will have a far better career than Dane Cook.”
Chiles said social media sometimes can create an illusion of success. Spending hundreds of hours on stage working on the craft still matters, he said.
“You have to do the work,” he said. “The harder you work, the luckier you get. I’m very frustrated with comedians who don’t see that. It’s two full-time jobs.”
Nate Jackson, a 44-year-old comic who has 3.1 million followers on TikTok and estimates he has spent 20,000 hours onstage, agreed. His hard work has enabled him to transition from comedy clubs to theaters in 2024 with a stop at Atlanta Symphony Hall March 9.
“There’s the daytime hustle with social media when I might be editing a video and a night-time hustle with stand-up,” Jackson said. “TikTok rewards consistency and talent. I’ve learned what will radiate with my audience. And look. I’m actually funny.”
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