Matt Rife: Unwrapped – A Christmas Crowd Work Special Key Art | Image via Netflix
Summary
Matt Rife: Unwrapped – A Christmas Crowd Work Special is an hour-long contractual obligation, playing things painfully safe for everyone.
Netflix loves Christmas for financial reasons and Matt Rife for contractual ones, so it’s unsurprising to see the two combined in Matt Rife: Unwrapped – A Christmas Crowd Work Special. The fact that the hour was filmed in Tempe, Arizona, in October, and finds Rife half-dressed as Santa in front of a hearth festooned with stockings, is the first disingenuous note of several, and the feeling of the streaming giant having kicked a lump of coal out of the door is never quite overcome.
The falloff of Matt Rife will probably be studied by comedy historians for years to come. From a grinding club career and a stint on MTV’s Wild n’ Out to extreme social media virality and beloved YouTube specials, Rife seemed like the rarest thing – an overnight sensation who had actually put in the work to deserve the attention he was suddenly getting. Then he released his first Netflix special, Natural Selection, at least in part to prove that he wasn’t just a crowd work comedian, and nobody liked it. He made some jokes that were deemed cancellable, responded pretty poorly to the controversy, and then released Lucid, a conciliatory crowd work special that… nobody liked.
And so the ironic circle was complete. Any efforts to branch out from crowd work were met with such vitriolic distaste that even the return to crowd work wasn’t well-received. It’s like everyone realised at once that Rife isn’t funny, and that his act is almost exclusively of interest to similarly-aged single women or social media-savvy divorcees. I don’t feel especially strongly about him one way or the other – I think he’s pretty sharp, but largely not very likeable – but I am fascinated by his career, which has suffered on account of its very unique trajectory, from his propulsion to stratospheric heights on the rocket fuel of TikTok virality and the burgeoning popularity of crowd work to the rapid plummet from grace after being left to languish in a mainstream spotlight.
All this to say that Matt Rife: Unwrapped is a very Matt Rife special. It’s the response of someone trying to prove he can still do what he became famous for, but doing it with the tinge of resentment over having been forced to resort to the old shtick and a flutter of we-made-it arrogance about the special still airing on Netflix. The overall effect is weird, lacking the glossy professionalism of an arena-style special – say, for instance, Kevin Hart’s latest – but also the intimacy and genuine unpredictability that made Rife’s viral crowd work so engaging.
It doesn’t help that there’s a theme. The special’s logline promises riffs on gifts, traditions, and the naughty or nice list, and we definitely get those, because Rife asks the audience outright if they have any good examples of each subject. The most annoying criticism of crowd work comedy is that everyone is a plant, which is rarely true, but this kind of format makes everyone feel like a plant, even if they’re not. It wouldn’t do for Rife to ask for funny holiday traditions and get none in return, especially when he’s filming a special. That artificiality runs kind of contrary to the essential spontaneity of crowd work.
This is something that Rife even addresses in the special when a guy in the crowd just so happens to be a professional magician. And while I’m reasonably sure that was an authentic interaction, it is a reminder that a crowd work special is, by definition, only as good as the crowd. Unwrapped has some fine anecdotes and one-liners, but it doesn’t have anything to rival that infamous Christina moment, or the time he rather sweetly brought a woman battling cancer on stage with him. Those were organic instant-classic bits that are perfectly suited to social media promotion. But they shouldn’t be the nucleus of a comedy show, because you can’t guarantee they’re going to happen. The point of crowd work is supposed to be promotion, enticing an audience without giving away any of the written material. In Unwrapped, the crowd work is the only point, and that sense of striving for another viral moment is pervasive.
This is why Matt Rife is fascinating to me. There’s a cynicism to this entire package that can’t be disguised by its Christmas wrapping paper. It’s an hour-long contractual obligation in its least-offensive form – there’s another slight domestic violence gag here, but it probably won’t take – that it’s clear nobody wanted, since Lucid did significantly worse viewership-wise than Natural Selection, even though it was the former that caused people to sour on Rife. And yet he still seems quite smug about it all. That’s an impressively unique situation for anyone to be in. But it’s hard to justify recommending Unwrapped over any of his TikTok reels.
